Ukraine’s former economy minister Bohdan Danylyshyn has said that he is ready to return to Ukraine if he is withdrawn from the international wanted list.
"I’ve been on vacation since Aug. 4. I have prolonged it to undergo treatment. I am ready to come whenever required to give relevant testimony. Take me from the international wanted list, it looks barbaric. And I will come," Danylyshyn said in an interview posted on the Ukrainska Pravda Web site on Thursday.
The ex-minister vowed: "I will speak up, if you allow me to do this, starting from who was sheltering the tender chamber ending with whose interests were behind certain kinds of purchases, not only in 2008-2010."
According to Danylyshyn, ‘politics or membership in the coalition or the opposition has nothing to do with it.’ "I hope that apart from the prosecution for political reasons, our state has an efficient system of justice, which is capable of conveying my position and helping restore the truth," the ex-minister said.
Danylyshyn added that members of the Ukrainian parliament were blackmailing Yulia Tymoshenko during her premiership aiming to manipulate state procurement tenders.
"The first steps to legally regulate state procurement procedures" were made and a department was created to streamline the procedures after the government procurement functions had been transferred to the Economy Ministry, he said.
However, according to Danylyshyn, the department, from the very first days of its work in this direction, had been facing "enormous, in form and fact, resistance from those who had been previously making a profit on public procurement." According to the ex-minister, these were the former heads of the Tender Chamber.
Danylyshyn said that "this tender gang" included representatives from all of the major parliamentary factions.
"All attempts to safeguard state funds and establish order in the state procurement sector had been met by the tender mafia with more and more resistance and counteraction, and the [then] premier [Yulia Tymoshenko] was not always able to help," he said. "After some Ukrainian MPs blackmailed the former prime minister in person, I was forced to transfer the state procurement functions to one of the minister’s deputies and dismiss the department’s director." Danylyshyn, who is on the international wanted list, was detained in the Czech Republic on Oct. 19. A criminal case was opened against him under part two of Article 362 of the Criminal Code (the abuse of authorities and official position). He is alleged to have cause ddamages to the state worth Hr 13.9 million.
On Aug. 11, Danylyshyn was put on the state, interstate and international wanted list.
