KIEV, Dec. 23 - A senior presidential official has expressed suspicion that Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had clinched an underhand deal with U.S. financier George Soros and that this supposed deal was responsible for the recent plunge in the value of the hryvnia.

"Recently the Cabinet of Ministers has enlisted the services of some foreign financial consultants. This is an initiative that would deserve nothing but approval, but there are reasons for anxiety, namely the nontransparent procedure for their employment, the cost of their services, which runs into millions of euro per month, and the absence of any publicly known results of their work - effective anti-crisis decisions by the Cabinet of Ministers," Ihor Pukshyn, deputy head of the Presidential Secretariat, said.