KIEV, Nov. 25 – Leaders of opposition groups Friday boycotted a meeting with Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, signaling that work of newly elected Parliament may be disrupted as the government faces looming fiscal and currency crises.

Azarov and the leaders of parties elected to Parliament were supposed to meet to outline steps that need to be taken to arrange the work of the legislature following October 28 elections.

“Yesterday, I for the first time have taken part in a group organizing the work of Parliament’s new session,” Azarov wrote on his Facebook page. “I was surprised that the meeting was not attended by the leaders of the opposition groups that had been elected to Parliament.”

Parliament’s outgoing lawmakers will have the last session on December 4, after which the newly elected lawmakers will take their take seats in the legislature.

The opposition groups strengthened their presence in Parliament after the elections, and this will probably make it harder for the government to have their bills approved. Any standoff may also lead to disrupted work of Parliament, suspending key legislation at the most sensitive time.

Azarov called the boycott the “contempt of their colleagues,” and accused the leaders of filing to understand “an important role that Parliament plays in the life of our country.”

Arseniy Yatseniuk, the leader of the opposition Batkivshchyna group, said the opposition parties will not cooperate with the riling party until they agree to support a bill that bans lawmakers from using voting cards of other lawmakers.

Although the constitution directly prohibits lawmakers from using other lawmaker’s cards in voting in Parliament, this norm has been widely violated with lawmakers giving their cards to their supervisors. This allowed the ruling Regions Party to approve bills that require 226 votes even when most of their lawmakers had not been in attendance.

“Parliament will not work until a new system of personal vote is in operation,” Yatseniuk said. “There are no compromises. You either vote personally, or you break the law.”

The government is yet to submit the 2013 budget bill to Parliament, and its approval is the key step for the government to seek resumption of borrowing from the International Monetary Fund.

The resumption of the $15.2 billion stand-by loan from the IMF, which was suspended two years ago, would be needed for the government to make sure Ukraine repays its foreign debts next year. It may also help to stabilize the hryvnia, the local currency, which has been facing downward pressure over the past several months.

The National Bank of Ukraine has been tapping its foreign exchange reserves to support the hryvnia, but downward pressure was so big that some analysts have predicted that depreciation is imminent.

The hryvnia has been trading at 8.2 to the U.S. dollar for most of the past week, but analysts see the hryvnia losing value to 9 hryvnias per dollar by the end of the year, with some predicting it may trade at 10-12/dollar in January 2013.

In a desperate attempt to stop the hryvnia's decline, the NBU resorted to recently gained special powers to force exporters to sell a half of their hard currency earnings for hryvnias on the interbank market. The measure is expected to be in effect for at least six months. (tl/ez)