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Parliament to probe conflict at Kyiv Post
Journal Staff Report

KIEV, April 18 – A special Parliamentary committee will investigate an escalating conflict between the owner of Kyiv Post weekly newspaper and journalists that have declared an indefinite strike over alleged censorship attempts.

About 30 reporters at the English-language weekly went on strike on Friday after the publisher had announced decision to fire the newspaper’s editor apparently over a sensitive interview with the Agriculture Minister.

“We will insist that the committee should investigate the case,” Mykola Tomenko, an opposition lawmaker, said Monday.

Brian Bonner, the editor of the Kyiv Post, said he was fired following an argument with Mohammad Zahoor, the newspaper's British owner since 2009, who had apparently demanded to kill the interview. However, Bonner ordered the interview to be published.

“The firing of Bonner, who has held the position for nearly three years, destroys the newspaper’s history of independent journalism,” said a Facebook posting by the paper’s staff.

In the interview, Mykola Prysyazhnyuk defended Ukraine’s controls on grain exports, imposed after last year’s poor harvest.

Prysyazhnyuk also made comments on Yuriy Ivaniushchenko, a powerful lawmaker and an ally of President Viktor Yanukovych who is believed to have dramatically increased control over Ukraine’s agriculture sector.

The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine and international grain traders on Monday issued a letter to Yanukovych demanding the president to veto a controversial grain export restricting legislation.

The bill, which has parliamentary approval and needs the president’s signature to take effect, “contravenes market principles, current legislation” and Ukraine’s international obligations, the chamber said in the letter.

Some companies “received quotas for free, while others would have to pay for them at auctions,” the chamber said in the letter. Yanukovych’s office has yet to respond.

Prysyazhnyuk denied any interference on his part.

Zahoor, who built a successfl steel business in the Donetsk region, admitted to the Financial Times the timing of Bonner’s removal was “wrong”, but that he had been fired due to longstanding differences over the paper’s direction.

“We wanted not just political news,” said Zahoor, saying he wanted the story delayed to improve it. “We are running a commercial newspaper and we are not willing to subsidise it for the rest of our lives . . . We are not going to bow to any pressure – either from the government or from our own journalists.”

Ukraine imposed the quotas in October after Russia banned all cereal exports following a drought that seared fields. (tl/ez)




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