KIEV, Jan. 28 – Finance Minister Viktor Pynzenyk, who has apparently warned the government about a looming economic doomsday, is in a hospital with high blood pressure, a person familiar with the situation said Wednesday.

Pynzenyk was on medication for at least two weeks, the person said, adding that the minister had been repeatedly showing up in government offices to sign some papers.

Pynzenyk was recently seen in the offices accompanied by a bodyguard that had prevented any communication with journalists, according to at least one reporter.

This makes Pynzenyk the second senior government official hospitalized over the past two weeks following the hospitalization of Oleh Dubyna, the head of state gas firm Naftogaz Ukrayiny.

Dubyna has been in the hospital with a heart problem since last week following his signing of the Russian-Ukrainian natural gas agreement that had resumed supplies of gas to the European Union.

Under Ukrainian law, government officials cannot be dismissed when they are out sick,

Pynzenyk appeared in focus Tuesday after a secret memo, allegedly written by him, had predicted the collapse for economy unless the government takes urgent actions to cut budget spending and other unpopular things.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been in favor of rampant social spending for the past 12 months, apparently told Pynzenyk to scrap the memo and not to show it to anybody. She predicted the economy would start to recover in June.

The memo said it was “too optimistic” to expect that the economy would contact by 5% in 2009. Tymoshenko expects the economy to grow 0.4% in 2009.

The memo said a third of the Ukrainian industry had been wiped out by the global financial crisis, and said the economic situation in the country was “the worst in the world.”

Pynzenyk and Tymoshenko have repeatedly clashed last year, including at least once in public, during the preparation of the 2009 budget. Pynzenyk said the budget was not realistic and had refused to defend it in Parliament in December 2008.

Meanwhile, Tymoshenko’s press service on Wednesday released a statement - citing Pynzenyk – saying that the secret memo was a “falsified provocation” against the government. The press service cited Pynzenyk as saying he had never written “any secret memos to the government.”

Hours later the Finance Ministry’s own press service released a full statement from Pynzenyk that had not contained such a strong language used by the Tymoshenko press service.

“I am not familiar with the memo that had been posted on the Internet,” Pynzenyk said. “The Finance Minister writes a lot of memos to the government. They are not supposed to be discussed in public.”

“The fact that a publication has been made yesterday I consider to be a provocation,” Pynzenyk said.

Meanwhile, there was a growing consensus among Ukrainian political leaders Wednesday that the memo had been indeed written by Pynzenyk.

“Whatever whoever tells me, I can see that the memo has been written personally by Viktor [Pynzenyk]. I know his writing style,” Arseniy Yatseniuk, a former speaker of Parliament and a former economy minister who had worked closely with Pynzenyk for years, said.

Yatseniuk criticized the Tymoshenko government for trying to keep the memo secret, and urged it to take quick decisions to fix the problems.

“One has to come out and say what must be done and not to mislead the people from television screens,” Yatseniuk said. (tl/ez)