You're reading: Prosecutor’s Office hopes Scherban case will be passed to court by summer

The deputy head of the main investigation department for investigating particularly important cases at the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, Oleh Pushkar, has said he hopes that the Prosecutor General's Office will complete the investigation into a criminal case on the murder of MP Yevhen Scherban by this summer. 

“It’s very hard to make a forecast. You see how hard it is to conduct these trials in our country. I hope that this will happen soon, possibly within a month or within the next two months. There is also the process of the suspect’s familiarization with the materials of a criminal case,” he told journalists in Kyiv on Monday.

When asked what determines the time of the submission of the Scherban case to court, Pushkar said: “It depends on how long a person studies the case materials.”

When asked by Interfax-Ukraine whether this means that a criminal case on Scherban’s murder will be passed to court by this summer, he said: “I very much hope that it will already be in court [by then].”

He also said that investigative measures were planned with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, but he did not specify when they could be held.

When asked if Tymoshenko’s health might prevent her from participating in investigative measures over the next six months, he said: “We wish her a speedy recovery… We hope that she won’t be sick for six more months… If it’s a serious illness and she’s not allowed to work, of course, we will wait until she recovers. If the medical staff tells us that it’s possible, we’ll start working.”

Pushkar also said that Tymoshenko has every opportunity to participate in the trial through videoconferencing or personal participation in court sessions.

As reported, Scherban, a Verkhovna Rada deputy and a member of Liberal Party Executive Committee, was shot dead at the airport of Donetsk upon his arrival from Moscow on Nov. 3, 1996. The assailants fled the scene in a car. Scherban, his wife and a mechanic died from gunshot wounds on the spot, and a flight engineer was wounded in the neck and died in hospital.

In April 2003, the Court of Appeals of Luhansk region sentenced Vadym Bolotskykh to life imprisonment for Scherban’s murder.

Scherban’s son, Ruslan Scherban, a member of Donetsk Regional Council, said at a press conference on April 4, 2012 that he had passed to the Prosecutor General’s Office documents indicating Tymoshenko’s and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s possible involvement in his father’s murder.

Tymoshenko and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko have categorically denied being involved in the murder.

On Jan. 18, 2013, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said at a briefing that the Prosecutor General’s Office had finished its investigation into the criminal case on the murder of MP Scherban and that Tymoshenko had been notified of being suspected of having organized the crime, along with Lazarenko.

Kyiv’s Pechersky Court found Tymoshenko guilty of abuse of office in concluding a gas supply agreement with Russia in 2009 and sentenced her to seven years in prison on Oct.11, 2011. She has been serving her prison term at a penitentiary in Kharkiv since December 2011.

On May 9, 2012, Tymoshenko was moved from the prison to Central Clinical Hospital No. 5 in Kharkiv.