EU suspends € 600 million support for Ukraine. “Reforms have to speed up”

The European Commission will not transfer the last € 600 million tranche for Ukraine. This action is a part of current Macro-Financial Assistance programme. It is worth € 1.8 billion and was approved in 2015. However, it is ready to consider the issue of further MFA provided reform momentum is stepped up.
According to the Commission, in a statement published on the 1st December, “Four of the measures linked to the third and final tranche of this MFA currently remain outstanding. Against this background, the Commission is not in a position to disburse the last tranche of the current MFA programme”.

Ukraine has received two tranches worth € 1.2 billion under the current programme.

“There is still room for improvement”

Anton Antonenko, an expert of DIXI Group, said that the program the EU approved in April 2015 amounted to the planned financial support of EUR 1.8 bn. It was linked to the certain indicators of reforms progress and EUR 1.2 bn in two tranches were already provided to Ukraine. – As for the third tranche, it is important to mention that the European Commission named measures to advance ongoing reforms of energy sectors among those fulfilled by Ukraine. At the same time there are four areas where, according to the Head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine Hugues Mingarelli, the progress is still expected – said Antonenko. These are lifting the ban on wood exports, launch of automatic checks of electronic declarations, the law on the credit registry of the National Bank of Ukraine and checking of the information about beneficiary owners of companies. – The Commission voiced its readiness to assess the progress and potentially present new proposal for the macro financial assistance in early 2018. Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko announced after the Eastern Partnership summit in late November that the EU would present the proposal for three another tranches for 2018-2019 of the same amount as the previous program. He noted that the work on this will be continued from January 2019 – he added.

Antonenko also said that if to talk about progress of the energy reforms in Ukraine, the areas where the most developments are expected are completing the reform of the regulatory authority, effective implementation of the competitive electricity market and introduction of the Energy Efficiency Fund along with other energy efficiency measures adopted in legislation.

Union