By RIA Novosti,
Kiev : Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has refused to allocate some 420 million hryvnias ($80 million) to finance early parliamentary elections, Ukraine’s UNIAN news agency reported on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s top security body, the National Security and Defense Council, demanded that the government transfer the money to election officials on Monday. However, no cabinet session was held and no money has been transferred.
A top official from Ukraine’s Central Election Committee was cited by the agency as saying that the country’s top election body “cannot carry out the elections” if the money is not provided.
On Monday, a presidential decree ordered the government to allocate the money for the elections from the country’s reserve fund. Tymoshenko has called an emergency cabinet session for Tuesday. The session will start at noon (09:00 GMT).
President Viktor Yushchenko ordered last Thursday the dissolution of parliament and called snap parliamentary polls for December 7. The move followed the collapse of the ruling pro-Western coalition. Yushchenko blamed the collapse of the ruling alliance on his former ally, Tymoshenko, saying that she had put “personal interests over national ones.”
The country’s pro-Western ruling coalition collapsed on September 3 when the pro-presidential Our Ukraine withdrew from the alliance after Tymoshenko’s bloc joined with the opposition Party of Regions, led by Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych, to approve legislation substantially cutting presidential powers. Yushchenko called the move a “constitutional coup.”
However, the presidential decree to dissolve parliament and call early polls was overturned on Saturday by the Kiev District Court, which ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc against the president and the Central Election Commission.
In response, Yushchenko signed a decree late on Monday abolishing the court, replacing it with two administrative courts.