Feathers fly in Europe’s battle with Ukrainian chicken boss

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Feathers fly in Europe’s battle with Ukrainian chicken boss

30 April 2019
News
Ukraine's top poultry tycoon is stirring up even more tension in the EU by expanding his empire.

Billionaire Yuriy Kosyuk and his chicken business MHP is already a bête noire to EU farmers, who argue that he won a major trade victory against Brussels by exploiting a legal loophole in the EU-Ukraine trade deal to vastly increase exports of chicken breast — the prime cut.

Pressure is mounting for the EU to walk back those trade perks for Ukraine, and to take action against Kosyuk's next goal: the international growth of his empire through a €100 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

Green MEP Thomas Waitz said it is incoherent to spend billions of euros subsidizing European farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy to keep them afloat, while at the same time handing money to foreign multinationals that threaten European farms. "Are we talking about capitalism? Or are we talking about betrayal?" he told POLITICO.

"How can we feed them with cheap loans of taxpayers' money?" Waitz said, adding that he would be lobbying his national capital, Vienna, to think twice about assenting to the loan.