Prime Minister of Ukraine Arsenii Yatseniuk said at a meeting of senior officials of the Ministry of Infrastructure on 2 July that the managements of seaports should not be credited with the increase of revenues in the port industry and that it was the consequence of the devaluation of the national currency, the CFTS correspondent reports.
"The increase of revenues is due to only one thing – arithmetic, the exchange rate of the national currency because all port charges are pegged to the dollar," said Yatseniuk.
According to Deputy Minister of Infrastructure Yurii Vaskov, the volume of cargo handling at Ukrainian ports increased by 4%, payments into the state budget from the port sector increased to UAH 2.7 billion, and the net profit increased three-fold to UAH 3 billion in the first five months of this year.
The net profit is expected to reach UAH 8 billion by the end of the year. However, Vaskov noted a catastrophic reduction of investments in development of the port industry and said that the level of depreciation of the infrastructure at state-owned stevedoring companies had reached 90%.
