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Posted by Mother Teresa's Lawyer on September 08, 2005 at 08:38:28:
In Reply to: Re: I told you so! Big news on TV in Ukraine posted by SDJ on September 08, 2005 at 07:46:44:
Another interesting story, you here everywhere that "Ukraine is the fastest growing economy in Europe". It's complete nonsense, the numbers were totally falsified. Here's what happened. There was a tax refund plan in Ukraine where exporters would essentially receive back from the government VAT payments. So what happened? Almost every big business in Ukraine sent in bogus VAT refund claims, which amounted to billions of dollars. These phony VAT numbers were then used as a basis to calculate the GDP of Ukraine, since they were supposed to reflect real exports instead of phoney scams by Ukraine's biggest companies. Well, it turns out they were caught in their scheme. Yushenko was standing in the Rada in front of a live TV camera, ordered the camera turned off and read out the list of names, most of the companies were owned by members of the Rada!!!! If you don't believe this story here are two links:
http://eurasia21.com/cgi-bin/news/print.cgi?ID=4145
http://www.firstnews.com.ua/en/business/business.html?id=62145&fp=76
So in conclusion, last year Ukraine falsified fundamental economic data, in a separate situation it appears they're doing it again with inflation data. Is this a government you can trust??