The law on oligarchs, aimed at limiting the influence of the richest people in Ukraine on the media and political life, can become a tool in the fight against political opposition. The goals of the adoption of the bill by President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with Lente.ru were named by billionaire and non-factional deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Vadim Novinsky.
“If a businessman decides to financially support the opposition, he will immediately be declared an oligarch, and the opposition will be proxies of the oligarchs,” Novinsky said.
He stressed that many provisions of the law are declarative and vague. According to him, the danger is also posed by the fact that the law delegates the right to determine who is the oligarch in the country and how to deal with them not to the courts, but to the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), as advised by the law enforcement agencies.
“This law carries in itself an initially negative charge, since it forms base Bolshevik feelings in society – envy, hatred and others. We already had a lot of populist laws – starting with the law on lustration, adopted under Poroshenko, on the abolition of parliamentary immunity, delegation of court functions to the NSDC, and so on. The de-oligarchization law is one such populist law, ”said the politician and businessman.
Novinsky added that the law contradicts the Constitution of Ukraine, which explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of property.
On September 23, the Verkhovna Rada adopted in its second, decisive reading, a bill on “de-oligarchisation,” prohibiting the country’s richest people from funding political parties and owning media outlets. 279 deputies voted for the document, the overwhelming majority of them are members of the pro-presidential faction “Servant of the People”. The deputies opposed and abstained from “European Solidarity”, “Opposition Platform – For Life” and “Batkivshchyna”.
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