• The Economic and Trade Development Ministry registered two more industrial parks, one in the Chernivtsi region city of Novodnistrovsk and one in the Kyiv region city of Fastiv, Interfax Ukraine reported. Both parks meausre roughly 15 hectares. The Novodnistrovsk park will produce electrical equipment, clothes and food, while the FastIndustry park in Fastiv will have businesses in construction materials, mechanical engineering, woodworking, pharmaceuticals, electronics and IT, among others.

• The Ukrainian Sea Port Authority will dredge a berth at the Port of Yuzhne in preparation for construction of Cargill’s $100 million grain terminal with a capacity of 5 million tons, multiple sources reported. The newly installed head of the port authority, Raivis Veckagans, said success in this project would signal major international investors that Ukraine can handle similar projects. The tender for the dredging is to be held in February.

• Foreign businesses invested $3.8 billion in Ukraine last year, double the amount from 2015. Economic Development and Trade Minister Stepan Kubiv said, as reported by Ukrinform. He highlighted Ukraine’s rise in the annual Doing Business rankings as a sign of the positive trend in the Ukrainian investment climate.

• After four straight years of decline, Ukraine saw an uptick in industrial production in 2016, the State Statistics Service reported. The increase was 2.4 percent, which marks a dramatic reversal from 2015, when industrial output fell 13 percent.

• The Economic Development and Trade Ministry plans to keep reducing the number of permitting documents so that people seeking to do business in Ukraine will have an easier go of it, Ukrinform cited Minister Stepan Kubiv as saying.

• Three former high-level executives at PrivatBank, which the government nationalized in December, plan to start a company offering banking services, according to an Interfax Ukraine report citing a Facebook post. The company will be called Fintech Band, and it will provide processing, customer relationship management systems, credit cards, Internet banking, etc.

• Budget airline Yanair has wide-ranging expansion plans, Interfax Ukraine reported. It applied for rights to operate regular service to Israel on a Zaporizhia-Tel Aviv route of seven flights a week and add a flight to its twice-weekly service on the Lviv-Tel Aviv route. Also, the company is seeking authorization for Kyiv-Athens service of seven flights a week. And lastly, Yanair plans to boost passenger offerings to Georgia by 15 to 20 percent in 2017.

• Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said the government's Investment Support Office will help monitor the business environment in every region of Ukraine, adding that authorities will eliminate any problems or obstacles to business that arise, Ukrinform reported.

• Netherlands based Trafigura, one of the world's largest energy traders, has become a player in the Ukrainian gas market, Liga.net reported. The amount of gas it has imported into Ukraine so far is relatively minor, but the mere presence of Trafigura is considered to be positive.

• Experts forceast that Ukrainian farmers may export 43.7 million tons of grainin the 2016-17 marketing year, which ends in June 2017, according to NGO Economic discussion club via Unian. That would be another new record.

For comments and news tips, please email UBJ AM editor David Edwards at david.edwards@theubj.com.