New nice budget.
KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's young government, which rose to power on the back of mass protests, promised to revamp the budget to give a lift to the poor and end the graft and waste which marked its predecessor's rule.
"We believe it will be quite a nice budget," Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko told Reuters in an interview late Friday.
Her government plans to finalize a revised budget for this year on March 19 and will present the draft to parliament two days later for approval.
"The budget we inherited looks very much like a large accident in the country's public life," Tymoshenko said.
She said there was a hidden deficit of around $6 billion in the previous government's budget proposals because of populist spending pledges it made without setting aside money to pay for them.
"It is a very large sum. We are trying to balance this and create a budget practically free of deficit."
Tymoshenko, a popular and fiery street orator in support of the 'Orange Revolution' late last year which handed her ally Viktor Yushchenko the presidency, said her government was focusing on rooting out waste and corruption.
She cited the need to curtail Ukraine's pervasive shadow economy, thought to be about the same size as the official one.
She also wanted to end tax evasion and large scale smuggling.
Her government, in office less than two months, has promised to end the corruption and unfair business practices which marked the rule of ex-President Leonid Kuchma and scared away foreign investment in what used to be one of the wealthier regions of the Soviet Union.
"It means a totally new management of what remains of state property.
But she said ordinary Ukrainians would not be hurt.
"We have no intention of touching people in terms of the benefits they receive. On the contrary, we intend to raise benefits," she said.
The government plans to multiply benefits for such groups as orphans and single mothers and to boost salaries of doctors, teachers and the military by 56 percent, she said.
She also included privatization receipts of 5-6 billion hryvnias ($944 million to $1.13 billion) which she said meant the budget would be balanced.
Under IMF calculations, those receipts would not be counted as revenue and Ukraine would run a budget deficit equivalent to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product.
Last year, the budget deficit rose to a five-year high of $1.7 billion.
"In our system of counting, it is not a deficit budget ... we don't consider this a deficit because we are not going to borrow on foreign markets."
$=5.296 hryvnias
