Kharkiv – The defense team of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been informed that criminal cases were opened against Ihor Maryinkov and Serhiy Zaitsev at the time they were interrogated by the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) on the criminal case on the murder of Ukrainian parliamentarian Yevhen Scherban, who was shot dead in 1996.
“Today we received a lot of information about witnesses Maryinkov and Zaitsev. As far as I know, at the moment of their interrogation in spring 2012 numerous criminal cases were opened against them. This means that these people were dependent and they still depend on the prosecution agencies,” Tymoshenko’s defense lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko told a press briefing on Wednesday.
According to him, criminal cases on tax evasion were opened against Zaitsev.
Vlasenko also stressed that Tymoshenko’s defense team demands that witnesses for the defense be interrogated on the Scherban murder case at the stage of the pre-trial investigation in the same way as the witnesses for the state.
“We have filed a petition that is word for word the same as the one filed by the prosecution with exactly the same explanation. And I would like to see how the fairest court in the world – Pechersky District Court [in Kyiv] – led by an outstanding modern legal expert, a member of the Supreme Council of Justice, Inna Oleksiyivna Otrosh, responds to our motion,” Vlasenko said.
