Economy

Ukraine's finance minister satisfied with course of talks with IMF on new program

 A Ukrainian delegation during the Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) continued discussing the new financing program and moving forward in these negotiations, Ukrainian Finance Minister Oksana Markarova has said.

She said that the negotiations are moving forward quicker than in the previous years. Last year's negotiations took too long, there were several visits to the United States to Annual Meetings, she said in an interview with the Voice of America in Washington on Thursday.

The finance minister said that a number of program conditions have already been met, in particular, laws on the split of the National Commission on Financial Service Markets Regulation, on the economic operator, and on the joint transit regime have been passed.

Markarova confirmed that during the negotiations, stability and normal operation of the banking sector are discussed. PrivatBank is a very difficult issue, nothing has changed: there is a legal strategy that we are following, there are UAH 155 billion that the state invested in this bank, therefore, the issues of the banking system are being addressed, as well as the matter of getting money back, not just PrivatBank (of course, it is the largest), but also of other banks and bad loans, including state-owned banks, the minister said.

She also said that she had a constructive meeting with representatives of the U.S. Treasury and did not see any changes for the worse in the relations between the parties.

Ukraine is negotiating the possibility of the IMF opening a new three-year extended fund facility in the amount of $5-6 billion. In September, the IMF mission visited Kyiv. Subsequently, it announced plans to continue the discussion in the coming weeks.

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