You're reading: Under pressure, husband of opposition MP Orobets flees Ukraine

The husband of opposition member of parliament Lesya Orobets has fled Ukraine, fearing pressure and possibly arrest by Ukrainian authorities.

Fighting back her emotions while speaking at a press conference on June 20,
Orobets, a Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party lawmaker, said her
husband had left the country on June 12. She did not say where he had gone.

“I have
before me today a very difficult task. Today I should come home and find the
words to tell my children that their father  will not see them for the next
few years,” she said at the press briefing. “He was forced to leave the
country because there is a criminal case (pending) against him.”

The State Tax Service of Ukraine has
accused officials at investment company Phoenix Capital of evading Hr 4 million
in taxes and falsifying documents. Orobet’s husband, Oleksandr Omelchuk, is the company’s
founder and chairman of its board.

Tax police raided Phoenix Capital’s Kyiv
office on Nov. 13, 2012, shattering the glass doors of the office in the
process. The tax service’s press office
said at the time that the searches were authorized by the city’s prosecutor’s
office and stressed the investigation was connected
with the company’s administrative and economic activity, and had nothing to do
with politics.

Opposition
members, however, have called the case against him politically motivated to
target Orobets.

Omelchuk is the second spouse of a Ukrainian lawmaker
to flee Ukraine in recent years. Oleksandr Tymoshenko, the husband of former
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who is currently in jail after being found
guilty of abusing her powers for brokering a 2009 gas deal with Russia while in
office, left Ukraine for the Czech Republic in January 2012, where he was
granted political asylum.

In a letter
written days after he was granted asylum, Oleksandr Tymoshenko explained that
he had left because of “enormous pressure and persecution
carried out by the Ukrainian government and
the authoritarian regime of President (Viktor) Yanukovych.”

He also wrote that he believed the
government had targeted him to get to his wife.

“The government regime in Ukraine
does not shy away from any dirty methods. They were not able to break
Yulia Tymoshenko either through intimidation, courts, imprisonment, or torture.
So they resorted to more abominable means; they began pursuing me and other
members of her family.

“I do not want to provide Yanukovych with any
additional leverage against the opposition and for me political asylum is the
only way to achieve this goal.”

Kyiv Post editor Christopher J.
Miller can be reached at 
[email protected], and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.