Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushenko will push for the privatization of seven Ukrainian power distribution companies during visits this week to Paris and London, officials said Wednesday.
Kiev expects to sell 51 to 75 percent of shares in the regional energy companies by the end of the year to bring at least 132 million dollars (155.5 million euros) into state coffers, said a spokesman for the state assets fund.
Yushenko was set to meet Jean Lemierre, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London on Thursday to discuss financing two new nuclear plants in Ukraine.
The EBRD has demanded that Kiev privatize at least four of the seven energy companies in order to receive a 200-million-dollar grant to build the Rivne and Khmelnitsky plants, which will replace output from the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
The Ukraine authorities have pledged to shut down the last reactor still in operation at Chernobyl on December 15.
Up to 30,000 people have died as a result of the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, when Chernobyl's reactor number four spewed into the atmosphere radiation equivalent to 500 Hiroshima bombs -- KIEV (AFP)
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