KYIV, Jan. 15 (AP) – Ukraine’s top prosecutor charged deputy prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Monday with stealing Russian natural gas and tax evasion, in one of the country’s highest-profile probes into official corruption.
Tymoshenko fiercely denied any wrongdoing and claimed the case was orchestrated by political rivals, and she filed a complaint against Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko, the Interfax news agency reported.
Tymoshenko was ordered not to leave the capital Kyiv, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor-general’s office said.
Tymoshenko was charged with falsifying documents, evading taxes and illegally siphoning off 3 billion cubic meters (105 cubic feet) of Russian natural gas piped through Ukraine, the spokeswoman said.
Prosecutors have said Tymoshenko presented gas stolen from Russia as having been bought through a British company, and then exported it and hid $1.8 billion in profits abroad. No monetary figure was cited Monday.
Moscow has long accused Ukraine of siphoning off gas that Russia exports through Ukraine to the West, and the issue has been a thorn in relations for years. There was no immediate comment from Russian officials on Monday’s charges.
Most of the alleged crimes were committed in 1996-97, when Tymoshenko headed a key energy supplier, Ukraine’s Unified Energy Systems (UES).
Tymoshenko’s husband Oleksandr, a top UES official, and the company’s deputy director were detained last year on suspicion of misappropriating state funds in metal-trading deals.
Yulia Tymoshenko was a close ally of former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who fled the former Soviet republic in February 1999 and is now in a U.S. jail on charges of conspiring to launder millions of dollars in bribe money.
Tymoshenko was elected to parliament in 1997 and became deputy prime minister in charge of the troubled energy sector late 1999, joining one of Ukraine’s most reformist governments since the Soviet collapse.
Tymoshenko insists that she is an efficient manager whose reform efforts have been thwarted by corrupt officials.
She refused a lawyer during a six-hour interrogation in the prosecutor’s office Monday, saying that she had nothing to defend herself of.
“I am an innocent person,” Tymoshenko said, according to Interfax. “I am sure that this is a political reprisal,” she said.
“This is a part of the plans of those clans who want to limit my actions aimed at establishing order in Ukraine.”
