KIEV, December 26. /TASS/. At least 54 lawmakers of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, or parliament, have been found to cancel their businesses of businesses of their families, the Nashi Dengi (Our Money) television program said on Friday.
"In violation of the law, each eighth lawmaker did not declare his or her or a family business," the program said.
According to Ukraine’s unified state register of companies and organizations, the lawmakers understated 100 companies, of which 52 are owned by themselves, 45 are owned by their family members (most often by the spouse), and two more are join family businesses. The biggest number of undeclared businesses per one person - ten companies - is owned by Sergei Drayuk, a lawmaker with the Popular Front. In his tax return for 2014, he declared neither of the companies with his interest. After Nashi Dengi told about these violations on October 29, charter contributions were added to his personal profile on the Verkhovna Rada website. "Anyway, it does not cancel the fact that the original declaration was incomplete," Nashi Dengi said.
The biggest number of businessmen lawmakers - 16 people - are members of the presidential Pyotr Poroshenko Bloc. Next is the prime minister’s Popular Front, with nine businessmen lawmakers. Among those who understated their businesses are six lawmakers with the Opposition Bloc and six with Volya Naroda (People’s Will), four lawmakers with Yulia Timoshenko’s Batkivshchina (Fatherland) and four with Vozrozhdeniye (revival), three with Samopomoshch (Self-assistance), two with the Radical Party. The rest are off-faction lawmakers.
Among these lawmakers are the leader of the Popular Front faction Maxim Burak, who owns the Bukovinskaya universal exchange and the leader of the Batkivshchina faction faction Yulia Timoshenko, who did not declare four companies co-owned by her husband Alexander Timoshenko.