Almost all MPs of the Verkhovna Rada, 396 out of 415, received a one hundred per cent increase in their salary for January 2023 for "intensity of work," the Ukrainian Pravda reports, citing the response of the Verkhovna Rada's office to a request.
"The average payment per deputy in January 2023 amounted to UAH 48.8 thousand. This amount includes the actual salary, a 100% salary allowance, and variable payments - for an honorary title, for an academic degree, funds for vacation, sick leave, or a business trip," the statement said.
The largest payments were made to Parliament Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk - UAH 78,900 - and to Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, who recently ran for PACE president - UAH 69,100.
The lowest salaries were those of Valeriy Lunchenko, a deputy from the Dovira group, who received 4.9 thousand hryvnyas, and Oleksandr Dubinskyy, who was expelled from the Servant of the People faction and received 5 thousand hryvnyas.
Of those 19 MPs who did not receive an intensity allowance, 17 did not receive any payments for January, in general. These are mainly MPs deprived of their mandates from the banned OPFL (Ihor Abramovych, Oleh Voloshyn, Taras Kozak, Nataliya Korolevska, Renat Kuzmin, Viktor Medvedchuk, Yuriy Solod, and unaffiliated Andriy Derkach), as well as several MPs from other factions and groups, including Larysa Bilozir, Oles Dovhyy, and Olha Stefanyshyna.
Two more MPs, deprived of his mandate Andriy Aksyonov from the OPFL and Serhiy Shakhov of the Dovira group, did not receive their salaries but got compensation for unused vacation and reimbursement for business trips, respectively.
In total, all payments to MPs in January 2023 amounted to UAH 19.4 million, which is almost twice as much as in the same month last year, when the budget spent UAH 10.3 million.