The State Fiscal Service introduces the post of the Commissioner for Enterpreneurship (business ombudsman), and former Vice-President of the American Chamber of Commerce Kachka will take up this post.
Ukraine increases the volumes of the natural gas injections into underground storage facilities to save up 19 billion m3 by October, in time for the heating season. Currently storage facilities contain more than 13.3 billion m3. The stocks are being replenished at a rate of 50 million m3 per day.
Kyiv Economic Court dismissed the General Prosecutor's Office request to invalidate two contracts of sale of 11 billion m3 of natural gas between Naftogaz and Gazprom from 2009, owned by oligarch Firtash RosUkrEnergo company. Firtash abjudged the natural gas from Ukraine in the Stockholm arbitration with the assistance of Azarov government officials .
Fuel and Energy Minister Demchishin said that the regional gas companies owned by Firtash, owe Naftogaz more than USD 4 billion for the delivered process gas.
The 1st unit of Khmelnitsky Nuclear Power Plant with capacity of 1 GW was stopped for a scheduled maintenance. In general 10 units of TPP out of 15 are running at the moment. Zmiivska TTP of the Tsentroenergo company was also stopped due to the lack of coal in warehouses. At Uglegorskaya TPP, located in the fighting zone, three units are running , and the same number of units are running at the Tripolska TPP. Slavyanska TPP coal reserves will last only till the end of the day. Ongoing contract deliveries are received from Russia on a permanent basis in a volume of 0.8 GW. Rolling blackouts are not yet applied.
The Cabinet canceled its decision adopted in 2014 on stimulating the consumers of natural gas and thermal energy to transit for the use of electricity and on improvement of tariffs for population and other consumers.
Fuel and Energy Minister Demchishin said that next year, as part of the diversification of the nuclear fuel supply, over a third of it will be purchased from the Westinghouse American corporation . He also said that this year, the contract with "Gazprom" will be definitely signed, since it won’t be possible to guarantee the supplies of the natural gas in winter without the supplies from Russia. In his oppinion, the purchase price for the natural gas should not exceed $ 250 per 1,000 m3 until the end of the season, and will probably be lower. It is planned to receive the money for its purchase from the World Bank.
The police closed the criminal proceedings regarding the death of former MP and Head of the State Property Fund Chechetov.
The fire in the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant was localized in the forest area. Police suspects that the cause of the fire could be an arson.
The Cabinet of Ministers announced two versions of Ukraine’s economic development forecast for 2016. According to the optimistic forecast, the country's GDP is expected to increase by 12%, the pessimistic forecast tells about the GDP decrease by 0.3% and inflation rate at 14%. The IMF experts tend in their assessments towards the first option.
On August 12 the Ministry of Finance is scheduled to meet with the International Creditors Club , the Club initiated it to solve the issue of the restructuring of the public debt of Ukraine. The official Ministry website placed a message, according to which this meeting is considered the last opportunity to reach an agreement before the payment on Eurobonds in September and October. In case of failure to reach a consensus, Ukraine will have to use the alternative methods of implementation of the IMF program, in particular, introduction of the moratorium on payments, towards which the IMF has negative attitude but is willing to accept it. However, the leading Western agencies, Bloomberg and Fitch Ratings, assess the prospects of reaching an agreement as optimistic and put the figure of 22.5% as mutually acceptable for writing-off the national debt of Ukraine.
The official hryvnia exchange rate against the major currencies slightly decreased after the weekend: 21.26 UAH/USD (+0.17 UAH), 23.30 UAG/EUR (+0,30 UAH), 3.30 UAH/RUR 10.
