| State procurement bill stirs controversy within parliamentary coalition |
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| Friday, 08 February 2008 13:03 |
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President Viktor Yushchenko has said that after he submitted a bill on state procurements to Parliament, both opposition as well as coalition MPs started to collect signatures for the dismissal of speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Yushchenko said this at a meeting with the regional governors in Kyiv on February 7. However, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko denied this, saying that the parliamentary faction of her bloc would not add a single signature to the petition for Yatsenyuk's dismissal. She was addressing a meeting of Odessa Port Plant workers in Odessa. "Yatsenyuk was elected by the democratic majority and he will remain parliament speaker," Tymoshenko said. Yatsenyuk was sceptical about his possible dismissal, saying Parliament would be unable to collect 226 votes to sack him. He said that his position of a "staunch defender" of the presidential bill on state procurements caused great dissatisfaction among different political groups. On February 5 Yatsenyuk put to the vote a bill invalidating the current law on state procurements. However, just 215 MPs voted in favour, and so the minimum of 226 votes needed for the bill to be adopted was not attained. According to the voting results, 144 MPs of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc voted in favour and 12 MPs abstained; 69 MPs of the Our Ukraine-People's Self-Defence bloc voted in favour and three abstained; and two of the 20 MPs of the Lytvyn Bloc supported the bill. The Party of Regions and Communist factions did not vote. |
