IMF Plans Massive Austerity for Ukraine According to Crimea Leaders
Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post.com
Monday, March 17, 2014
If statements made by Deputy Prime Minister of Crimea, Olga Kovitidi, are to be taken as truth, the future of Ukrainians living under the yoke of Fascists, the European Union, and the IMF will be yet another example of the imposition of extreme austerity measures and national impoverishment that is the fruit of alignment with those institutions.
The Western-backed coup government in Kiev, of course, has already gone begging to the IMF for financial help after it turned its back on a much better loan offered by Russia. The conditions of the IMF loans are, as always, extreme levels of austerity measures and privatization of public services and assets.
Kovitidi, however, provides much more specific information regarding the nature of the IMF conditionalities.
The Deputy Prime Minister claims that the tentative IMF agreement involves handing over the entire country’s gas pipeline for free to the American company Chevron. She also claims that the owners of the Mariupol, Zaporizhzhya, and Dnipropetrovsk steel mills will be required to give up 50% of the ownership stakes to German company Ruhr.
The Finnish subsidiary of Ruhr, according to Kovitidi, will inherit the Donbass coal industry.
Kovitidi also stated that Crimean leaders have discovered that Kiev has promised Western financial interests that it will impose “unpopular measures in order to fill gaps in the Ukrainian budget.” One of these unpopular measures will be the rollback of mechanisms functioning as gas subsidies, forcing the prices of gas for municipal companies to increase by 50% and double for private companies.
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