Swindling prime minister gets American justice
Before the Orange Revolution, Ukraine was known in the West mainly for the Chornobyl disaster and perhaps the case of Pavlo Lazarenko. Lazarenko was President Leonid Kuchma’s prime minister from May 1996 to August 1997. The president dismissed him amid suspicions of corruption.
Lazarenko was not formally charged and became an opposition politician. He founded the Hromada Party, where Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko started, and won a seat in parliament. He prepared to challenge Kuchma for the presidency, but these plans were shelved after Lazarenko fled the country in 1999 hoping to find refuge in the United States. Instead, he was arrested and convicted on money laundering charges. Lazarenko joined former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega on the short list of two foreign leaders to be prosecuted on U.S. soil.
In 2004, a federal judge in San Francisco sentenced Lazarenko to nine years imprisonment for money laundering, wire fraud and transportation of stolen goods. Then on Sept. 26, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld eight of 14 counts in Lazarenko’s convictions for laundering money, part of the ill-gotten fortune he amassed during his brief reign. The three-member appellate court ordered his resentencing, setting aside Lazarenko’s previous nine-year prison term and a $10 million fine. The United Nations estimated that Lazarenko looted approximately $200 million in just one year as a prime minister, earning him the eighth spot in Transparency International’s 2004 list of top 10 most corrupt political leaders.
Ukraine’s general prosecutor has alleged Lazarenko was corrupt and launderied $880 million in stolen money. Several murders have also been pinned on him, including those of Vadym Hetman and Yevhen Shcherban.
The case still contains many unanswered questions as Lazarenko remains imprisoned, presumably somewhere near San Francisco. For example, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been accused of paying Lazarenko $80 million while she controlled gas-importer Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine in the 1990s. Tymoshenko has also been accused of smuggling Russian gas, forging documents and tax fraud. Lazarenko is believed to have helped her business capture the gas trading market and become the largest company in Ukraine at the time, cornering 25 percent of the economy, according to some estimates. No investigators anywhere are known to be considering any criminal charges against her. But her past ties with Lazarenko are trotted out periodically by political rivals. She was arrested for fraud in 2001 and jailed briefly. The charges were dropped and she emerged from prison a heroine.
Thanks to U.S. courts, the Lazarenko case is the only one of Ukraine’s major criminal cases where some justice has been served.
Some regret Lazarenko was not jailed in Ukraine. He is believed to have incriminating information on many high-level officials still in power. For his part, Lazarenko has promised to return to Ukraine and to politics when he gets out of prison. In 2006, Lazarenko even won a seat, in absentia, on the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast council.
