Food Prices A Mystery for Ministers

When you drive cars like that, do you really care?

Reporter: Please tell us, do you know the current price of a loaf of bread, ten eggs, and a kilogram of meat?

Minister of Transport, Yosyp Vinsky: This question goes to my wife.

Minister of Justice, Mykola Onishchuk: I actually don’t have time to do shopping, so I’d rather not engage in a discussion regarding the prices for these groceries.

Minister of Family Affairs, Yuriy Pavlenko: I’ll tell you everything, definitely. Hahaha!

Minister of Labor, Lyudmyla Denysova: I don’t buy eggs because of the fast. A loaf of bread — well, my daughter buys that. [We make] toasts. I actually don’t eat them because I don’t dine at home at all.

Is that the same daughter you hired out of college to run the price controls board in Sevastopol? What if she doesn't dine at home either?

Video uploaded from: http://censor.net.ua/go/offer/ResourceID/116491.html
Original source: http://kanalukraina.tv

Making Fun of Failure

PM Tymoshenko: We’ll do everything to have Yosyp Vinsky travel by handcar. After all, he’s the Minister of Transport, right? Let him travel. Would that be fine? Hahaha! All right. Still, I really don’t think we have a problem there. I think Yosyp Vinsky is a very modest person, and he will never indulge in any kind of misappropriation. You know, I’m proud of having such a team in our government today. I want to ask: When will the time come when officials will bear responsibility for having plundered Ukraine so bigtime? And Yosyp Vinsky will go on being a modest person, and will be further driving modestly.

What a modest punishment for breaking the self-extolled rules!

Video uploaded from: http://censor.net.ua/go/offer/ResourceID/79059.html

Socialist 500L

Ukrayinska Pravda grills the transportation habits of Yosyp Vinsky, a former member of the Socialist Party and current Minister of Transport.

As shown in the picture, Mr. Vinsky was recently sighted exiting a Mercedes S500L 4Matic. Further investigation revealed that the car belongs to SMAP, a state-owned company controlled by the Ministry of Transport (MoT), and carries a price tag of 1,167,000 hryvnias ($231,090).

That’s a tad too bourgeois, considering the manifesto with which the Tymoshenko Cabinet graced the airwaves a month and a half ago:

As long as there are poor people in Ukraine, Cabinet members will not be buying such expensive cars. If you look at the French government, they don’t ride in S-Class there. Even in America you won’t see such things. And here it’s as if we’re the richest country.

The promise boiled down to a price cap of $100,000 on cars purchased for Cabinet members. Technically, the car was not procured for the MoT. Still, it does give the impression that some Cabinet folks are too cool to observe the $100,000 rule.

When questioned about the story, Vinsky casually replied: “I don’t know what car I ride in. I just use what they gave me.”

That’s no accident. In Ukraine, $ocialists and civil $erpents spend tons of money without noticing it.

Take Vinsky’s former colleague and MoT predecessor Mykola Rudkovsky, whose embezzlement case is pending investigation. And don’t forget former Naftogaz chairman Oleksiy Ivchenko, another S500 Mercedes lover bankrolled by taxpayers’ money, whose love of luxury sparked a scandal that cost him his job.

It remains to be seen whether the stink will sink the king this time.

Sources:
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2008/3/13/72989.htm
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2008/1/30/70653.htm