Ukraine needs to adopt 43 laws to get into top-50 of Doing Business ranking, 23 of them by the end of May 2016 – Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine

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Kyiv, February 15, 2016. Ukraine needs to adopt 43 laws to get into top-50 of the Doing Business ranking. “These are the steps that we need to make in order to improve business environment and entrepreneurial work in Ukraine. The priority 23 laws need to be adopted and their implementation needs to be started by the end of May 2016,” said Yulia Klymenko, Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine at a press briefing at Ukraine Crisis Media Center. She said rankings are a certain signal for the international community and investors on the direction Ukraine is moving. Klymenko said that the plan for promoting Ukraine in the Doing Business ranking was drafted by the Cabinet of Ministers and approved in December last year. Since then the work is in progress over the draft laws that are required to achieve this. “At present 23 laws are drafted, 11 of them are registered in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) and two were adopted as a basis. One draft law has been introduced into the parliamentary agenda six times but has never been considered or voted,” said Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine. The rest of the draft laws are registered and are at different stages of the procedure. Twelve draft laws are ready for registration in the Parliament, noted Yulia Klymenko.

According to Natalia Sevostianova, First Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine, the rankings are not the goal itself, the aim is to improve the life of people, where achieving economic growth is crucial. The Ministry of Justice introduced online services a year ago, they clearly pointed at how quickly it is possible to move inside the Doing Business ranking, noted Deputy Minister. She named business registration the first illustrative example. “After we introduced free online registration for business that is done in 24 hours and allows automatically exchanging information between the Pension Fund, State Fiscal Service and other agencies […], we immediately went up in the ranking from the 70th to the 30th place in the business registration figure,” said Sevostianova. Another important figure that she named was implementation of decisions by national courts.

In this view a package of draft laws has been worked out, it foresees the introduction of the mixed system for implementation of judicial decisions including both state and private executives. Sevostianova also noted that legislation on implementation of “e-writ proceedings that can decrease the workflow of the judicial system” needs be amended. “The draft law worked out by the Ministry of Justice will enable Ukraine to go 75 positions up in the ranking based on the figure for contracts implementation,” emphasized First Deputy Minister of Justice.

Doing Business ranking marks how many investors in the world get to know what is going on in Ukraine, noted Oleksiy Honcharuk, director of the Better Regulation Delivery Office. “Government and the respective ministries have done their homework, we are now waiting for same fruitful work by the MPs,” he emphasized. Honcharuk called on the MPs to consider and approve the draft laws that Ukraine needs to improve its position in the Doing Business ranking.

Yulia Klymenko noted that 10 positions in the Doing Business ranking bring USD 600 million of investment on average. However these figures are approximate and everything depends on many factors in the country. According to the Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine about USD 5 billion of investment is expected in 2016.