Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, in the second year of a seven-year prison sentence, hasn’t seen the end of her legal woes yet.
On Feb. 13, a pre-trial
hearing started in Kyiv in which Tymoshenko is accused of involvement in the contract killing of Donetsk multimillionaire and member of
parliament Yevhen Shcherban in 1996.
The trial
started with scandal. A special police unit ejected oppositional members of
parliament from the courtroom for mocking the proceedings. Tymoshenko, detained
in Kharkiv, was not present. The penitentiary service claims Tymoshenko refused
appear this time as well, citing poor health. But Tymoshenko’s team claims the
penitentiary service prevented her from attending the trial.
Tymoshenko is
imprisoned for “abuse of office” as prime minister in brokering a gas deal with
Russia. The West and many Ukrainians regard her legal troubles as political
persecution to rid President Viktor Yanukovych of his most-feared opponent, who
came within 3.5 percentage points of being elected president in 2010.
In the first two
days of the murder pre-trial hearing, the court heard testimony from witness Ihor
Mariinkov of Donetsk. Mariinkov had never mentioned Tymoshenko’s name in the
previous investigation in Shcherban’s murder. He also admitted that he does not
know Tymoshenko and has never heard anyone claim that Tymoshenko had ordered
the killing.
However, he says
he heard from business partners and friends in criminal circles that Tymoshenko
owed money to Donetsk bandits. He also testified that he had seen Tymoshenko
meet with two of the so-called criminals — Yevhen Kushnir and Anatoliy Ryabin
in the National Hotel in Kyiv, where she resided in late 1996. Both Kushnir and
Ryabin are dead.
Another witness,
Donetsk businessman Serhiy Taruta, who has yet to testify in court, is already
claiming that Tymoshenko had no conflict Shcherban and did
not benefit from his slaying.
In an interview he gave to Ukrainska Pravda news
website on Feb. 8, Taruta, a former business partner of Shcherban and current co-owner
of the Industrial Union of Donbas corporation, said he was called to the
general prosecutor’s office to testify in the case “about three or four times.”
He claims that Tymoshenko’s UESU gas trading company had
made peace with Shcherban’s Industrial Union of Donbas. “All business conflicts
between us were over by January 1996 – nine months before Shcherban’s murder.
In January we were already in the same boat,” Taruta told Ukrainska Pravda.
This
undercuts the accusations made by the general prosecutor, who claims Tymoshenko
wanted to eliminate Shcherban over conflicting business interests.
According to the indictment, Shcherban lobbied the
Donetsk Oblast Administration to issue an order “with the goal of diminishing
the influence of the wholesale gas importer [Tymoshenko’s] UESU on the economy
of the Donetsk region.”
The order designated the “Industrial Union of Donbas
corporation as the sole organization which has the right to sign contracts with
wholesale importers of natural gas for further distribution of gas to firms of
Donetsk Oblast and collecting payments for it…”
Taruta, however, dismissed these allegations and said
that the oblast administration’s order didn’t prevent Tymoshenko’s UESU from
trading with the Industrial Union of Donbas: “After the order (initiated by) Shcherban,
(firms) have started to sign contracts with us. Without this (order) there
would be nothing – not for us, not for UESU… So it was good for everyone.”
He also claims that any natural gas conflicts between
the financial group from Donetsk, which Shcherban and Taruta belonged to, and
Dnipropetrovsk, which Tymoshenko and former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko
belonged to, were over by the end of 1995.
“By 1996 we received from UESU…the specifications on
the goods to be traded for natural gas… Shcherban’s murder did not change the
scheme, because the contract was signed for a year,” Taruta said.
An additional case that Tymoshenko has pending against her is on charges
of embezzlement during the 1990s when she ran UESU,
which was a dominant gas trading company. The trial has been repeatedly delayed
since last April due to her refusal to attend. The next hearing is expected to
take place on March 5.
Another former minister receives
asylum
Meanwhile another former Tymoshenko ally received
political asylum in Europe. Former Acting Defense Minister Valery
Ivashchenko was granted political asylum in Denmark, the Danish Foreign Affairs
Ministry is quoted as saying.
Ivashchenko, who served in then-Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko’s government from June 2009 to March 2010, was arrested in August
2010 over his alleged involvement in the illegal privatization of a
shipbuilding plant in the Crimean port of Feodosiya.
On April 12, 2012 he was sentenced to kive years in
prison. Ivashchenko denied any wrongdoing, calling the verdict unjust and
politically motivated. The verdict and Ivanshchenko’s long period of pretrial
detention were criticized by the Helsinki Human rights group, European Union, the
U.S. and the European Court of Human Rights. On Aug. 14, the Kyiv court of
appeal changed the verdict to a suspended prison sentence.
Speaking to Ukrainian-language weekly Tyzhden magazine, Ivashchenko said that
while in detention he was asked by the prosecutor to testify against Tymoshenko
and her right-hand man Oleksandr Turchynov.
“I was asked to claim that they were giving me
unlawful orders. But this never happened and I could not testify to this,” Ivashchenko
told Tyzhden.
The former economy
minister under Tymoshenko, Bogdan Danylyshyn, received asylum in the Czech Republic
in Jan. 2011. Another member of Tymoshenko’s government, Mykhailo Pozhyvanov,
who headed the National Land Committee, fled to Austria in 2011 when a criminal
case was opened against him in Ukraine.
Tymoshenko’s husband Oleksandr
received political asylum in the Czech Republic in December 2011.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be
reached at [email protected]
