The co-founder of Swiss-registered gas trader RosUkrEnergo (RUE), Dmytro Firtash, has not received any documents from the U.S. courts in connection with a lawsuit allegedly filed against him by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko concerning a dispute in a Stockholm court between RUE and Naftogaz Ukrainy.
"Fully supporting the ruling of the Stockholm arbitration, Mr. Firtash doubts that Ms. Tymoshenko has any grounds to challenge this decision in New York’s courts or any other judicial bodies," the press service of the Ukrainian businessman reported on Thursday.
Tymoshenko said Wednesday that she has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court against a controversial company over alleged corruption in natural gas trade with Russia.
Tymoshenko, who herself is under investigation for alleged financial misdeeds, filed the lawsuit in a New York federal court against Swiss-based RosUkrEnergo, which is jointly owned by Russia’s energy giant Gazprom and Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash.
The Kyiv Post has obtained a copy of the lawsuit filed in a U.S. court by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, accusing businessman Dmytro Firtash, gas trader RosUkrEnergo and Ukraine’s political leadership of "racketeering" and defrauding Ukrainians of billion-dollar volumes of natural gas by manipulating an international arbitration court ruling.
Firtash says he hasn’t not received any notification of legal action from any courts in New York, according to his press-service.
Firtash does not believe that Tymoshenko has any grounds for challenging such decision in New York or in any other Forum.
The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce obliged Naftogaz on June 8, 2010 to return RosUkrEnergo 11 billion cubic meters of gas and also pay it a penalty of 1.1 billion cubic meters of gas, as stipulated by the contract.
Naftogaz, in turn, returned 12.1 billion cubic meters of gas to RosUkrEnergo after buying the necessary amount from Russia’s Gazprom at $230 per 1,000 cubic meters.
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office opened the third criminal case against Tymoshenko in April this year, this time around on charges of abuse of office in concluding the gas contracts with Russia in 2009, which, according to the investigation, caused damages amounting to Hr 1.5 billion to the state.
