The General Prosecutor’s Office is scrutinizing how imprisoned ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko won a parliamentary seat in December 1996, Batkivshchyna opposition party said in a statement on March 14.
The party published a
letter dated March 11 from
the general prosecutor’s office to Central Election Commission
chief Volodymyr Shapoval that asks him to provide voter information
and other data from the single-mandate election district where
Tymoshenko received 92.3 percent of the vote in a by-election.
Specifically, the letter asks the
central election commission to provide the number of registered
voters in the election district for 1994 and 1996; the names of
candidates who ran in the district in 1994 and 1996; election results
for the district for both years; and the number of complaints
candidates filed once the election result was known.
The request furthermore states that the
information be provided by March 14 with the “requisite seal and
authorized signature.”
In response, Batkivshchyna’s press
service sarcastically proposed that the prosecutor’s office “also
probe whether she (Tymoshenko) had been a member of the Soviet young
Pioneer organization and Komsomol youth organization as well as
for complicity in the fall of the Soviet Union and the State Committee
for the State of Emergency (during the August 1991 putsch).”
A by-election took place in election
district 229 in Kirovohrad Oblast in 1996 after a lawmaker from that
constituency was appointed to a government post under then-Prime
Minister Pavlo Lazarenko.
Upon getting elected, Tymoshenko
entered the Constitutional Center parliamentary faction that was
aligned with then-President Leonid Kuchma.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can
be reached at [email protected].
