Miller Magazine Issue: 126 June 2020

75 ARTICLE MILLER / JUNE 2020 74 MILLER / JUNE 2020 “The newly passed Law on WWT with retreating Covid-19 is going to show what was right and what was wrong with it, but we are sure that the business will triumph on the whole, and we would be able to watch the Dnipro father as busy as the old man Thames, Danube, Rhine and so on and so forth.” Old Father Dnieper waiting for his ships Speaking about the rivers, we can’t but remember that they cradled the first human civilisations long, long ago, that they served the main and sometimes the only transport arteria for people – especially in southern jungles and northern taiga – and keep on serving that way or another, feeding us with fish and giving us potable water. When the industrial era started, first businesses tried to erect their factories and warehouses near ri- vers, lakes, and canals, called commonly the inland waterways (IWW), because it was and it is much more economical to transfer large numbers of goods and commodities by wa- ter, as the most advanced economies strive to do now. Arthur Nitsevych Andrii Netrebenko Partner Interlegal Maritime and Transport Project Manager Interlegal The draft Law on Inland Water Transport (IWT) of Uk- raine was decided to be developed as early as in 2014 pursuant to a corresponding clause in Agreement on Coalition of parliamentary fractions ‘European Ukraine’ – and it was only logical if looking at the volumes of cargo carried by that IWT. Say, in 2017 the EU countries transported above 558M t of cargoes by IWW, over 6M t more than previous year. Only in Germany such a th- roughput reaches average 240M t annually, while in the Netherlands it comprises 35% of all the country’s cargo traffic and 80% of bulk cargo traffic. So, the first bill was registered back in 2015, but its fate was not that lucky as of other EU-oriented initiatives. As the new Presi- dent Zelensky’s team came, one of their slogans was ‘stopping the bureaucracy’ which also implied the parliamentary red tape with bills, amendments and so on. Upon the new pre-scheduled elections the team obtained absolute majority in Verkhovna Rada (i.e. Supre- me Council, the Parliament of Ukraine) and indeed started issuing some long-ex- pected laws like a copy-machine. The Law on Concessions that had waited its second reading since April 2018, was easily passed on 03 October 2019, and the bill on IWT naturally seemed to be the next… Unfortunately, there are some issues in the current situation that divide the votes, sometimes one-to-o- ne. Of course, they reflect the views of different sta- keholders. For instance, most of Ukrainian land-locked shippers yearn for the cheap and abundant fleet taking their cargoes all along the Dnipro (Ukrainian for the Dnieper), and not only – there are some parts of Piv- denny Bug and Dniester navigable in the past, bringing them to other points, and ultimately, as most of them wish, to the sea- and ocean-going vessels. By all me- ans, they support free access to their cargoes by any flag ships, provided they are technically fit, which is understandable if considering the today’s situation with Ukrainian flag tonnage, both river- and sea-going. They could probably even live with some freight surc- harge arising from the river dues, as one of the first versions envisaged – a single and pro- portional payment for the use of fairways. On the other hand, some shipowners who have already heavily invested in their own river fleet and river terminals, are at least afraid of indecent compe- tition, and at most of losing their to some extent exclusive position in the slowly emerging market. They frantically fight against the idea of open Ukrainian IWW, as well as for exempting shipowners of any expenses arising from the use of IWW at all – on top of the operational costs and termi- nals charges. So, when the question arose about funding the maintenance of river fairways, they promulgated the concept of making the sea ports share their enormous, as they saw, incomes. Finally, the bill has been updated and refined, and pas- You could not step twice into the same river Heraclitus of Ephesus