Ukrainians suggest Poroshenko should force officials to invest in national economy

KIEV, October 31. /TASS/. Following a surge of public bewilderment over the riches declared by Ukrainian officials and members of parliament under a new system of electronic declaration of the personal financial status, Ukainians have come up with proposals to make high-rank personalities invest the resources declared in the national economy.

A petition for this was registered on Monday at the Ukrainian President's official homepage.

The document calls for passing a law that will make it mandatory for all the government officials, who have declared the cash reserves exceeding $200,000 to invest the monies in a Ukrainian bank or in other sectors of the national economy by any other suitable method.

The electronic declarations that have been published in the Internet for broad public review for the first time have produced a real shock among the rank-and-file Ukrainians. The diversity of material values and multimillion sums in cash, which people of the high governmental rank brought to public attention, make stark contrast with their relatively moderate official salaries.

Also, they may raise many questions among representatives of the anticorruption agencies that got down to work in Ukraine.

The system of electronic declarations was launched on September 1, 2016, as a key precondition for a much-desired EU decision on granting visa-free status to Ukrainian citizens.

All the Ukrainian officials and high-rank public employees were obliged to fill out the declarations until October 30. The system itself produced glitched on a whole number of occasions since its launch.

Ruslan Radetsky, a deputy director of the national agency for the eradicating of corruption said on Monday the first stage of filing the declarations had been completed.

He also said the registered users of the system had filed more than 103,000 declarations, including 11,700 amended ones.