It is one of Ukraine’s greatest unsolved crimes – and one of its most brazen ones as well.
In November 1996, gunmen posing as police officers drove up to the private jet of Yevhen Shcherban on the Donetsk airport runway. They sprayed automatic fire on the passengers after they deplaned. Shcherban and his wife were killed.
Who was Shcherban?
He was among the richest people in Ukraine, a prominent and influential member of parliament.
Shcherban owned Aton Corporation, a trading, production and finance company which many coveted.
And he was involved in the natural gas trade, the source of so many fortunes and so much corruption in Ukraine’s history. Prosecutors then said the hit on Shcherban was intended to eliminate competition for control of Ukraine’s natural gas industry.
Now prosecutors say they are trying to learn whether ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, then making a huge fortune on the natural gas trade, had a role in ordering the murder.
Tymoshenko calls the allegations part of the ongoing smear campaign against her to drive her out of politics by keeping her imprisoned on trumped-up charges.
“We have a transcript of a witness being questioned in the United States where the witness states directly that the murder of Shcherban was paid for from Lazarenko and Tymoshenko’s accounts,” said deputy prosecutor gene-ral Renat Kuzmin during his appearance on a political talk show on TV on Oct. 28. “We have the documents and want to check them.”
In 2002, eight men from the “Kushnir Gang” were arrested and tried for the murder. Yevhen Kushnir, who was considered an underworld figure in the early 1990s, is believed to have been murdered while in prison in 1998. All eight men were found guilty, with three receiving life sentences.
RosUkrEnergo’s co-owner Dmytro Firtash in 2008 also blamed Lazarenko for the murder of businessman and lawmaker Yevhen Shcherban, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor wrote in a diplomatic cable published on the WikiLeaks website.
“He (Firtash) stated that Lazarenko ordered the killings of Donetsk Governor Yevhen Shcherban in 1996 and the head of [gas trading company] Itera in Kyiv for not sharing Lazarenko’s gas business philosophy,” reads the U.S. ambassador’s cable, referring to a conversation that took place on Dec. 8, 2008.
In the past, law enforcement officials claim that former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko – Tymoshenko’s patron in the gas trade at the time — hired the eight men to kill Shcherban.
Lazarenko has always denied the charge. He is serving a federal prison sentence in America on a money-laundering conviction.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected].
