UKRAINE’S outgoing government is planning to loot the country during its last days in power, according to the man set to be its new president.

Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western opposition leader expected to take office after winning a rerun presidential election on Boxing Day, claims the old regime is planning hasty privatisations and the distribution of valuable rights and licences to its cronies.

Yushchenko’s opposition party has also linked the suicide of a government minister last week to efforts by the old regime to hide all traces of its past corruption, including attempts to manipulate the outcome of last November’s bitterly contested presidential election.

Yushchenko, 50, won the most votes in the rerun, but his rival, Viktor Yanukovych, 54, the pro-Russian prime minister, has refused to concede defeat, despite his resignation as prime minister on New Year’s Eve.

He has challenged the result in a process likely to delay his rival’s inauguration until later this month.

Yanukovych was the hand-picked successor of the incumbent president, Leonid Kuchma, who in his 10-year term has run an increasingly authoritarian administration that has been accused of corruption, censorship, election rigging and involvement in murder.

The opposition has accused Kuchma’s government of being too close to a small number of fabulously rich oligarchs.

Yushchenko has described a recent flurry of suspicious money transfers by the government, including one for £362m.

He has asked law-enforcement authorities to monitor such transactions and warned that his government would go after any high-level wrongdoers.

“Where there has been blatant fraud, there will be prosecutions,” he said.

Yushchenko has also indicated that Kuchma himself could be investigated for corruption and electoral fraud. “He is responsible before the law the same as any ordinary person,” he said.

He added that the president was also likely to face questions about last year’s privatisation of the steel group, Krivorozhstal.

The group was sold to a consortium headed by Viktor Pinchuk, Kuchma’s son-in-law, and Renat Akhmetov, reputedly the wealthiest oligarch in Ukraine.

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