Merkel offers German investment if Ukraine tackles corruption, Reuters reports:
Chancellor Angela Merkel pressed Ukraine on Saturday to tackle corruption and roll back the influence of oligarchs, saying German businesses are ready to invest there if the right conditions are in place.
Merkel made her remarks ahead of a visit to Berlin by Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk next Friday, when the two leaders are due to open a German-Ukrainian economic conference at which investment opportunities will be explored.
Praising Ukraine for being on a "courageous path", Merkel said the country still had a lot to do to attract business and needed to put the right legal framework in place.
"The dominant role of the oligarchs needs to be reversed, people need to be given transparency, corruption must be fought," she said in a podcast.
Merkel added that she did not see Russia's supply of natural gas to Ukraine as being threatened.
On Thursday, Merkel said she saw a "glimmer of hope" for a political solution to the Ukraine crisis, but insisted sanctions against Russia could be rolled back only once the Minsk peace plan was fully implemented.
The European Union and United States have imposed sanctions against Russia because of its annexation of Crimea and its support for separatist rebels in Ukraine's eastern regions.
Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] has tried to get a program probing corruption within its ranks removed from air, just weeks after two of the journalists were assaulted outside the SBU offices in Kyiv. Since it failed, there is no need to speculate on the reasons – the luxury vehicles that SBU staff use to get to work, rather than the public transport claimed, can be seen – and valued. The journalists note that the 50-70 thousand dollar price tags on many of these cars should require years, if not a whole lifetime for civil servants to earn.
Skhemy: Corruption in Detail is a joint initiative of UTV-1 and Radio Svoboda, with the program appearing every Thursday. Radio Svoboda reports that several hours before the latest edition was due to be broadcast, it received a letter signed by Mykhailo Hluhovsky, head of the Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast SBU. The letter cites various articles of the laws on the SBU and on countering terrorism, and suggests that filming SBU officers breaches their legal guarantees under these laws. It specifically suggests that filming anybody who has taken part or is involved in ATO [the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ or conflict in Donbas] could place them in danger.
It doubtless could but the program does not do this, and Katya Gorchinskaya, who heads the Radio Svoboda Investigative Journalist Programs says that they view the SBU intervention “as blackmail, and are shocked that the Security Service’s management should use such tactics against journalists”.
Here is today's map of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
