Comments Aleksandra Fedotova, Partner, Attorney for The Ukrainian Journal of Business Law
On 6 February 2020 Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine started consideration of the Draft Law of Ukraine On Amending some Legislative Acts of Ukraine Regarding the Circulation of Agricultural Land, No.2178-10.
Over 4,000 amendments were submitted to the Draft Law. As of the morning of 20 February, 2020 around 500 amendments had been considered. All of them weren’t adopted.
The following should be noted with regard to the meaning of the amendments.
Many amendments are similar in content (some are even identical). Some of them are of a purely declarative nature, such as prioritizing lease over a sale.
There are amendments offering to grant the right to acquire ownership to agricultural land through a mortgage via all types of financial institutions, and not only to banks.
There are proposals that are directed to limit the right to own agricultural land one more time without any proper justification, such as to prohibit transferring into lease agricultural land whose designated purpose is “individual farming”.
Some amendments propose to prohibit the changing of the designated purpose for some period of time or even without limitation or to introduce payment for selling land plots acquired through privatization within a certain period of time.
There are proposals (i) to alienate or transfer into usage municipal or state land plots only after the agricultural passport has been drawn up; (ii) to envisage the strategic fund of agricultural land in every region in the size of 20% of respective land; (iii) to maximize the minimum term of lease of agricultural land to 14 years.
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is working only on the Draft Law as of now. Based on such an approach our estimation is that the Draft Law will be adopted and the submission of such numbers of amendments was only a technical decision to delay adoption of the Draft Law, but not to change its sense. The current moratorium on the sale of agricultural land is expected to be lifted in early October 2020.