Canadian Firm to Print Ukraine’s Money : Company Hopes to Use Job to Get Business From Other New States

TORONTO —  When an independent Ukraine starts using its new money this year, the bills will be the handiwork of a Canadian printing concern, Canadian Bank Note Co.

Canadian Bank Note will print 1.5 billion bills for Ukraine, enough paper to fill 39 jumbo jets, according to corporate secretary Shirley Arends.

She said the company hopes to use the Ukrainian contract as a jumping-off point for negotiating currency-printing deals with the other new countries that were until recently Soviet republics.

Arends said that it is not yet sure what the new currency will look like but that it is being designed by two Ukrainian artists and will be “very typical of old Ukraine.” The money may be called the hyrvnia, which was the name of the Ukrainian currency before V. I. Lenin’s Soviet state absorbed Ukraine and introduced the ruble.

The name may still be changed, however, since many people outside Ukraine have a hard time pronouncing hyrvnia.

At the moment, Ukrainians are still using the ruble, although the currency’s value is in free fall. To keep ruble-rich Ukrainians from hoarding foodstuffs or other goods, then selling them on the black market, the Ukrainian government has also issued ration coupons that consumers must use in making purchases.

Arends said the company has promised Ukrainian authorities that it will deliver the entire order of new currency by the end of June. “In a normal company, it would take a year” to print such a large quantity of notes, she said.

The contract for the hyrvnia, with a value of about $32 million, is Canadian Bank Note’s largest overseas order to date.

Arends said Canadian Bank Note had a competitive edge in the bidding for the contract because of Canada’s large and well-organized Ukrainian community. Out of a population of 27 million, 1 million Canadians are of Ukrainian descent.

In February, she said, she took a call from a Ukrainian-Canadian in Ottawa who had been asked by the Ukrainian Parliament in Kiev to advise how the emerging nation could produce and circulate a new currency.

Canadian Bank Note expressed interest in bidding for the contract, and last summer a delegation of Ukrainians visited the company to talk business.

Ukrainian-speaking lawyers at two Toronto law firms acted for Canadian Bank Note and for the Ukrainian Central Bank.

The parties signed a letter of intent in New York City in September, Arends said, but the deal was not publicized because Ukraine was not yet independent, and diplomatic recognition from the West was not yet assured.

Arends said that Ukraine will pay her company in hard currency, not the hyrvnia itself. Despite the turbulence in the collapsing Soviet Union, she said Canadian Bank Note is confident that the new nation will be able to pay the printing bill.

In addition to printing and shipping enough hyrvnia notes to last Ukraine for its first two years as a new nation, Canadian Bank Note also intends to set up a printing company in Kiev. The new printing concern is to be half-owned by Canadian Bank Note and half by the government of Ukraine and is planned to have the capacity to print everything Canadian Bank Note’s existing Canadian facilities can do.

At present, Canadian Bank Note employs about 350 people, Arends said, and prints passports, postage stamps and securities certificates in addition to money.

She said Canadian Bank Note hopes to use the new, Kiev-based company to tender bids for currencies and other negotiable instruments of the newly emerging countries of the old Soviet Union.

“We obviously will spend a lot of our time in training” Ukrainian personnel, she said. “But we’re starting from a very sound base. Eastern Europe is very advanced in terms of high-tech. The one thing they have in Eastern Europe is education.”