A year ago Ukrainian oligarch Petro Poroshenko could barely compete to win the Kyiv Mayor elections, now he is the President of Ukraine. He won in the first round over Yulia Timoshenko herself. Who is the person that became President of Ukraine? Pavel Sheremet sketched a human and political portrait of the new Ukrainian President.
Petro Poroshenko
The new President of Ukraine started speaking Russian when addressing the citizens of Donbas. The speech was interrupted several times by the applause of Parliament members and guests.
Vitalii Usenko, June 7, 2014 10:25
Petro Poroshenko, the newly elected President of Ukraine, took an oath before the Ukrainian people and outlined major points of his development plan for Ukraine in his inaugural speech.
Petro Poroshenko took the Presidential oath at a solemn session in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada’s session hall and will continue at the National Sanctuary “Sophia”. The ceremony was attended by representatives of about 60 official foreign delegations. Continue reading
And how realistic they are
The Central Electoral Committee has counted 100% of the protocols at the early presidential elections. The end result – 9 857 308 people, or 54.7% of all those who have participated in the elections, voted for member of the Parliament Petro Poroshenko. The inauguration – in the case of early elections the law only gives the newly-elected president five days to take the oath, – it appointed for June 7th.
On the eve of the elections Petro Poroshenko took up a number of obligations – taking into account the special status of the early elections, the high level of support of the candidate and the unstable situation in the country, their realisation will be observed especially closely.
Forbes remembered Petro Poroshenko’s main promises and asked experts to analyse how difficult it will be for the new President to keep his word.
Mykola Pidvezyaniy, Kateryna Peshko, Stanislav Gruzdev (photo), “Glavcom”
When Oleg Liashko brought a cow to the Parliament, ate soil at the Verkhovna Rada booth and walked the city with a pitchfork, this was viewed as political extravagance – a trick that the smallest fraction of the electorate would fall for. However the results of the past elections prove that the main parliamentary rascal has a significant political perspective. The politician, who according to some experts, was under the patronage of Yanukovich’s team for the role of the oppositional clown, has already stepped out of this frame.
Poroshenko did not choose the best time to win the elections – Roshen will not give him more than a billion dollars. However, there are options.
1,5 months ago we wrote the following articles. During this time, it has not lost its relevance. How much will Poroshenko be able to get for his main business – Roshen company?
In an interview to the German newspaper Bild, Petro Poroshenko stated that in case of victory at the elections, he would sell Roshen corporation. Taking into account that within two months of the elections, 24.9% of the voters are ready to vote for him, and only 8.2% would give their votes to Yulia Timoshenko, the chances that Roshes would be sold are quite high. UPD on May 26th, 2014: After the announcement of the results of the exit polls, according to which Poroshenko is winning in the first round, the future President stated that he had already given orders to find a buyer for his main asset – the confectionery company Roshen.
The biggest confectionary company of Ukraine, Roshen corporation, is well-known outside of the country. And not because of the factories across the border, or because of the fact that the company’s produce is being supplied to markets in 35 countries. Roshen has stably been listed among the biggest confectionary companies in the world. According to the British specialised magazine Candy Industry, Roshen is the 20th biggest corporation in the world in terms of revenue, having gained about $1bn in 2013. A year ago they did better: Roshen’s revenue was $1,3bn, it took 18th place.
The main reason for the fall of revenue is the loss of the Russian market because of the trade wars. In one of his interviews, the general director of the company Vyacheslav Moskalevskiy evaluated the supplies to the northern neighbour at $200mn.
The annex of Crimea and the Kremlin’s rhetoric allow us to suppose the Poroshenko has lost not only the Russian market, but also the confectionary plant in this country, for a long time. In March of 2014 the Russian police arrested the accounts of the Lipetsk confectionary. The formal reason was that Roshen is suspected of producing counterfeit product, the informal one is pressure on one of the Euromaidan leaders and favourite of the presidential race. Production in Lipetsk has been stopped.
Last year Roshen was able to partially compensate for the Russian losses at the internal market. Poroshenko got lucky with the consumer boycott of Party of Regions businesses. Roshen’s main competitors – Konti and AVK – belong to “regionals.” This year there will be no such compensation.
How much could Roshen be worth? The corporation is not publicly, it has no consolidated financial accountability, its debts are unknown, the fate of the Russian assets is questionable, and a political and economical crisis is underway in Ukraine. But even with such details, it is possible to approximately evaluate the cost of Roshen.
The simplest and least sensitive to the above mentioned difficulties way to evaluate the company is to compare it to similar public corporations. Thus, the average coefficient “stocks price/revenue” for confectioners from Turkey and Poland constitutes between 1,3 and 1,9 now. This means that if the risks of doing business in Ukraine were the same as in Poland or Turkey, then it is most likely that Roshen would cost between $1,3 and $1,9bn (revenue multiplied by the coefficient). Last year Boris Kolesnikov put up his confectionary company Konti for sale for $1bn, which accorded to a coefficient of 2,4, however there were no buyers.
Today Ukraine is far from being Poland or Turkey. “Now the country risks are very high. The investment climate was being destroyed for four years, the economy is in recession, the relations with Russia are, to put it mildly, a cause for caution,” says CEO of the investment company Concorde Capital Igor Mazepa. “Therefore if the deal started now, the potential buyers would begin with a discount of 20-30%.” Another Ukrainian investment banker evaluated the discount at a minimum of 50%. “While Ukraine has a presence in the emergency CNN reports within the context of Russian tanks, it is senseless to sell anything.”
If Poroshenko were to sell Roshen immediately after the elections, it is unlikely that he would get more than a billion dollars, and the discount would constitute between $250 and $900 million. It is most likely he will not have to pay such a high price for his presidency. Time is on Poroshenko’s side. “Let’s wait until the beginning of the deal, see what the situation in the economy and politics is like,” says ICU investment company partner Makar Paseniuk. “It can be supposed that the coefficient for sales at a more stable time would be comparable to the numbers of world leaders – Nestle and Kraft Foods (now the coefficients are 2.33 and 1.82 respectively – editors). “Such big deals last for months, or even a year,” says Mazepa. “An it well may be that next year stocks from Ukraine would be sold with a premium, not a discount.”
Aside from coefficients and market conjuncture there are more important factors. A year ago, in his Forbes interview, Petro Poroshenko said: “The motherland and Roshen are not for sale.” Whether the presidential seat will force him to part with his beloved asset ‘for real,’ or whether Roshen will be given ‘for safekeeping’ to his faithful companions is an open question.
Boris Davydenko, Ivan Zaycev.
Source: LIGABusinessInform
Translated by Mariya Shcherbinina
Cunning and readiness to burn his own rating. Obviously, these are the main qualities politician Petro Poroshenko will need in the coming years.
One can only imagine what new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is feeling after his victory in the first round of elections. On the one hand, success, which he could not have dreamed of several months ago, or even thought about. On the other, the expectations for new Head of State’s actions are too high to begin with, and the challenges are too great. Therefore, every month of Poroshenko’s term as President of Ukraine will count for a year.
Sviatoslav Khomenko, BBC
Oleg Liashko, who took third place at the elections with a result of more than 8% of the votes, is already being called one of the sensational news of the presidential campaign.
Within several days before the elections, the sociologists did not give any chances to this candidate, and today experts are quite seriously predicting good perspectives for him at the possible early parliamentary elections. Continue reading
May 27th, 2014 
The Russian President was denied the right to interpret the Constitution of Ukraine.
The winner of the presidential elections in Ukraine Petro Poroshenko thinks that the Russian President Vladimir Putin has no right to call Victor Yanukovych the acting President of Ukraine citing the Ukrainian Constitution.
He said this in a conversation with a correspondent of the Russian “Kommersant” Andrey Kolesnikov.
To the remark that Putin has said numerous times that there are no formal grounds to consider Yanukovych an illegitimate President, Poroshenko replied: “This is the opinion of citizen Putin.”
“If someone thinks that there is something wrong in the country, let the go to the Constitutional Court. Citizen Yanukovych can file a plaint to the Constitutional Court with the appeal to the decision of the Higher Court regarding his deposition, and the decision of the Constitutional Court will be final and not subject to appeals,” he added.
At the journalist’s remark that none of the reasons written down in the Constitution of Ukraine, according to which Yanukovych could have been deposed, were adhered to, Poroshenko said:
“And who gave you the right to interpret my Constitution? You, esteemed Andrey, or you, esteemed Vladimir Vladimirovych, who gave you the right to interpret our Constitution?… Your opinion as a citizen of your country regarding who has to be President here does not interest me, just like a Russian citizen is not interested by the opinions of some Canadian or Austrian or Papua New Guinean citizen. This is not your place,” he concluded.
We remind you that on May 23rd the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin stated that Victor Yanukovych remains the legitimate President of Ukraine.
Source: lb.ua
Translated by Mariya Shcherbinina
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