According to Wikipedia, Walid and his brother, Omar, were born in Tripoli, Lebanon (not to be confused with Tripoli, Libya).
A successful, well-connected and controversial entrepreneur, Walid became a citizen of Ukraine in 2005. He speaks fluent Russian but not Ukrainian.
In late 2004, he led Robert Ménard of Reporters Without Borders on a Ukrainian tour meant to legitimize freedom of the press à la Yanukovych. (A few months earlier, an article in Libration had linked Ménard to Omar Harfouch and Muammar al-Gaddafi.)
After the Orange Revolution, Walid chased Yushchenko’s son-about-town in his Paparazzi magazine and suffered a burned Bentley. In the last presidential campaign, he coached Hanna Herman, Yanukovych’s right-hand woman.
For this longstanding service, they appointed him vice chairman of the National Television Company of Ukraine (NTCU). Just imagine a vice president of France Télévisions or RFI who doesn't speak French.
Asked about his vision for the company considering his “непроста біографія” (“tricky/checkered biography”), he dismissed the whole question as “racist.”
Attempts to reason with Walid failed. He called host Roman Skrypin “racist” and refused to answer the question. Roman called it a day.
Why overreact to a legitimate question aimed at filling in the gaps?
Should a public employee use his membership in an anti-racist organization as a defense against bona fide inquiries into his qualifications?
Speaking of qualifications, NTCU (read: taxpayer) has already been fined for missing the deadline on submitting Ukraine’s Eurovision entry, marred by a plagiarism scandal.
Video embedded from: http://zaua.org/pg/video/editorial_1/read/19766/
Operações de minagem das FAU na linha da frente de Pokrovsk
26 seconds ago
2 comments:
Well, it seems that foreign people can make a "nice" career in Ukraine. In Hungary foreign people couldn't get int such a high position in my opinion.
Unfortunately, Ukraine offers citizenship to people who identify with Ukraine financially, not culturally.
Some of them don’t even speak Ukrainian but end up running a company that should promote our culture and language.
Post a Comment