Parliament appointed Vitaly Koval to the post of Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food
Grain and roads
Vitaly Koval managed to build a diverse career both in public service and in business. At first he worked in the credit department of Ukrgasbank, and from 2006 to 2019. was a co-founder or manager at enterprises in the agricultural, transport and construction industries (Atlant-trans LLC, Investtradeservice LLC, RGS-Logisticgroup LLC, VVV Montazh LLC and Sanako LLC). It should be noted that the main activity of Investtradeservice and Sanako is wholesale trade in grain, unprocessed tobacco, seeds and animal feed.
The most famous scandal with Vitaly Koval concerns the VVV Montazh company, which he headed before his appointment to RODA: Bihus.info journalists claimed that companies associated with VVV Montazh received the largest contracts for road construction in 2020.
Koval managed to bolster his business career with education: he received an MBA degree from the Lviv Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University and studied at the Aspen Institute Kyiv.
Political ladder
His ascent into big politics began in 2019, when President Vladimir Zelensky appointed Koval as head of the Rivne Regional State Administration. Some observers believe that it was the head of state’s satisfactory work in the region that subsequently became the reason for his “transfer” to Kyiv - to the post of the Head of State Property Fund.
In open sources you can find mixed reviews about the professional competencies of Vitaly Koval. Some eyewitnesses and experts say that, as a business school graduate, he really focused on supporting and developing the business environment in the Rivne region, for example, attracting investments in the woodworking and furniture manufacturing industries. This is confirmed: even during the great war, the Danish company Hjort Knudsen opened a furniture production plant in the region. At the same time, other participants in the events said in the media that Koval’s numerous meetings as the head of the Regional State Administration with local businesses often did not bring results, such as projects to build housing for displaced people.
State property management
As for work at the State Property Fund, Koval himself set a strategic goal to make its assets (a total of 1.5 million objects) available for investment. As a result, over the six months of 2014, the State Property Fund sold 213 lots at successful auctions, which were attended by 1,200 participants (leading, by the way, Rivne region). The average degree of competition was 5.5 offers per auction - the head of the fund noted that this was 2.5 times more than it was before 2019.
Among other achievements, the State Property Fund announced for the first time in Prozorro.Sales online auctions in the field of large-scale privatization (i.e., objects with a book value of more than UAH 250 million). Bidding for the Ukraine Hotel and United Mining and Chemical Company JSC should take place on September 18 and October 9, respectively.
Challenges in the agricultural sector
At the same time, you need to understand that managing the State Property Fund, which must look for investors and ensure revenues to the budget (this year’s target is UAH 4 billion), is far from the same as the formation of agro-industrial policy. However, given past experience in agricultural and transport enterprises, Vitaliy Koval knows the main problems of the Ukrainian agricultural sector from the inside: the first need is to ensure agricultural exports under unfavorable military and political conditions (remember, Polish farmers have already announced new protests).
Another thing is that the minister must think not just like a businessman or an MBA, but like a politician. That is, to prioritize not the current profit of firms, but the sustainability of the sector in the long term. In Ukrainian conditions, agribusiness as a whole must gradually reorient itself from grain trading to processing. This will increase added value per ton of products shipped and reduce conflicts with farmers in neighboring countries. What vision the new minister of agricultural policy has is still unknown. On the one hand, as a businessman he was associated with the grain trade, but on the other hand, he developed processing in another industry (furniture) as a civil servant. Therefore, we will be able to draw the first conclusions about the direction that Vitaly Koval will give the ministry in a few months. One of the markers will be the development of relations with neighboring European countries for the export of Ukrainian agricultural products.
