Yulia Tymoshenko

Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko speaking at a session devoted to issues of payments for natural gas consumed in Ukraine since the beginning of 2009, Kyiv, Tuesday, March 3, 2009. In the course of the session, Yulia Tymoshenko voiced her intent to involve the Prosecutor’s General Office, the Control Revision Department and the State Tax Administration in improving the payment discipline of heat community energy companies and regional gas companies in the sphere of payments for natural gas. The Prime Minister noted that the session participants should find real mechanisms of timely payments for natural gas. According to Yulia Tymoshenko, as of today, the arrears, including that of communal and regional gas companies, make 10.7 billion hryvnias [~US $1.2 bn]. Since the beginning of the year, the arrears soared by almost 5 billion hryvnias [~US $0.55 bn]. Photo by Oleksander Prokopenko/POOL/UNIAN