Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Sviridenko may leverage her own staff and government experience to address the challenges facing Naftogaz. In particular, to ensure natural gas supplies for distributed generation. This was stated by journalist and blogger Serhiy Lyamets on Facebook.
The expert believes that Sviridenko will have difficulty solving all of Naftogaz's problems, some of which are systemic. But he noted that she is capable of improving the company’s operations.
He emphasized that the specifics of Naftogaz involve a large volume of administrative and managerial work, for which specialized education in the oil and gas sector is not mandatory. According to him, Naftogaz functions as a large bureaucratic structure, and Sviridenko well knows the mechanisms of the state apparatus and the big picture of the country's economy.
"I don’t believe that Ms. Sviridenko will be able to overcome all the mentioned challenges, because some of them are historical—for example, the status of a monopoly. But I will remind you that former head of the company Serhiy Koretzky managed to bring some order to UkrNafta’s work. The opinion is this: if Ms. Sviridenko does well in some area of the job, as Koretzky did, it will be very good. Moreover, contact with Koretzky is probably not bad. And the former prime minister has repeatedly demonstrated a strange ability to simply do the job—quietly, without unnecessary pomp and grand speeches," Lyamets wrote.
One of the areas where Sviridenko could demonstrate results, Lyamets named the establishment of natural gas imports. This refers to the planned procurement and storage of the resource in advance, when prices are lower, and not right before or during the heating season.
"At the same time, I think Ms. Sviridenko will be quite able to arrange gas supplies for distributed generation. They want to receive gas at a preferential tariff, although this gas is imported at market prices. But what can you do: when there is a lack of capacity for electricity and heating production, compromise solutions are needed. Ms. Sviridenko has shown herself to be very flexible when she headed the government," the expert emphasized.
Lyamets noted the absence of public scandals around the former prime minister related to conflicts of interest or use of official position.
"I haven’t heard of Ms. Sviridenko awarding herself a premium, as Kobolev and Vitrenko did, or lobbying a scheme like Kudrytskyi. So far she has traversed the corridors of power fairly cleanly. So she is very cautious about questions of reputation," the blogger wrote.
According to Lyamets, Sviridenko's experience in implementing various managerial projects is more important than specialization in the oil and gas industry. In his view, this provides grounds to believe there are more arguments in favor of her appointment as head of Naftogaz than against.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item ""Здатність зробити справу без зайвого пафосу." Блогер Лямець оцінив шанси Свириденко очолити "Нафтогаз"". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Gordon.