Former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko continues to refuse to participate in investigative actions, the State Penitentiary Service of Ukraine has reported.
“Yesterday, Tymoshenko was handed an invitation to participate in a court hearing via videoconference (between the Court of Appeals in Kyiv and Ukrzaliznytsia’s Central Clinical Hospital). The convict read the invitation and said that she would not participate in the hearing, stating that she had not had enough time to prepare for it,” the statement reads.
“In addition, convict Tymoshenko said in her statement that she demands that the court postpone the investigative action (the questioning of the witness with her participation) for two or three weeks,” the prison service said.
The prison service also said that the identity of the witness, whose questioning is scheduled for 1400 on Thursday, was specified in the notice of the court.
On February 6, Judge of Pechersky District Court of Kyiv Oksana Tsarevych postponed the questioning of a witness in the case on the murder of MP Yevhen Shcherban in 1996, which was to involve Tymoshenko via a video linkup, for 1400 on February 7.
The judge said that the court received Tymoshenko’s request to postpone the questioning of the witness due to the fact that she was not ready to participate, as she was not notified about this event in time.
As reported, Yevhen Scherban, a member of the Liberal Party’s executive committee and a parliamentarian, was gunned down while disembarking from a plane at the Donetsk airport on November 3, 1996. The killers fled the scene in a car. Scherban, his wife and a mechanic died from injuries at the scene. The plane’s flight engineer suffered injuries to his neck and later died in a hospital. The law enforcement agencies ruled out a political motive behind the crime at the time.
Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka announced on January 18, 2013, that the Prosecutor General’s Office had completed an investigation into Scherban’s murder and notified Tymoshenko that she was suspected, along with former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, of organizing the parliamentarian’s killing. Pshonka said also that the case concerning Scherban’s murder had been combined with the case on the embezzlement of budget money for settling the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine’s (UESU) debts to the Russian Defense Ministry.
