Ukraine's Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka has said that the allegations about former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's involvement into the murder of MP Yevhen Scherban were announced back in 2001, but Tymoshenko has been avoiding trial.
“Back in 2001, adviser Lazarenko (former Ukrainian prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko) said that Tymoshenko was involved in financing and organizing the murder of Scherban. Therefore this information is not new and was made public twelve years ago. However, Tymoshenko has been evading responsibility in every possible way. She has been hiding behind the posts, the MP’s mandate, the political status, etc.,” Pshonka told German and Ukrainian journalists on Wednesday during a working visit of the Ukrainian PGO’s delegation to Germany, the PGO’s press service reported.
According to the prosecutor general, law enforcers had questions to Tymoshenko starting from the late 90s. “But she has never answered them in any of the criminal cases against her, which have been numerous over the past fifteen years,” he said.
Pshonka also noted that only a court could determine the degree of culpability of a person, as well as the punishment. He also expressed the belief that law enforcement agencies of no country would ignore such crimes. “And Ukraine is no exception,” he stressed.
As reported, Pshonka said at a briefing on January 18 that the Prosecutor General’s Office had finished its investigation into the criminal case on the murder of MP Yevhen Scherban, who was shot dead in 1996, and that former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had been notified of being suspected of having organized the crime, along with former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko.
Pshonka also announced that the criminal case on the murder of Scherban and the criminal case on the embezzlement of public funds to repay debts of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) Corporation to the Russian Defense Ministry were united in one case.
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 on the spot. The plane’s flight engineer suffered injuries to his neck and later died in a hospital. Law enforcement agencies ruled out a political motive behind the crime.
The Luhansk Regional Court of Appeals found Vadym Bolotskykh guilty of killing Scherban and sentenced him to life in prison in April 2003.
Yevhen Scherban’s son, Ruslan Scherban, a member of the Donetsk Regional Council, said at a press conference on April 4, 2012 that he had passed to the Prosecutor General’s Office documents indicating Tymoshenko’s and Lazarenko’s possible involvement in his father’s murder.
Tymoshenko and Lazarenko have categorically denied being involved in the murder.
