A former Ukrainian prime minister, a boss whose power and will made many people's blood chill, ends up in an American jail for money-laundering, is accused of murder back home while many of his former allies are exposed in the course of his long saga in the American courts.
Sounds like stuff
for a book, doesn’t it? And indeed the story of Pavlo Lazarenko has
been recently turned into a book by Serhiy Leshchenko, deputy
chief editor of
Ukrayinska Pravda
online newspaper.
It was presented on June 11.
His investigation is based
on Lazarenko’s case documents that one can find in the District
Court of the Northern District of California, headquartered in San
Francisco. According to Leshchenko, he had spent three weeks studying
the documents.
The American Saga of Pavlo
Lazarenko might be an example of the reversibility of justice for
corrupt officials in a democratic country, the author believes.
“Secondly, this is a personal human tragedy, when from the top of
fame, political power and multimillion wealth you are falling down
into the abyss of prison,” Leshchenko wrote in the foreword to his
investigation, first published on Ukrayinska Pravda website in autumn
2012.
“The idea to publish the
book was born naturally. I had collected a lot of material on
Lazarenko’s American trial and his life in America. When I finished
the series of articles, I thought about it, and (Istorychna Pravda’s
editor) Vakhtang Kipiani offered me to do it. I expanded the scope,
and now it’s 320 pages long,” Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post. In
addition to what has already been published, the journalist added
new facts and exclusive illustrations to the printed edition.
The book was funded by
the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) and Ukrayinska Pravda.
According to Leshchenko, IRF paid Hr 48,221 for 500 copies and book
presentations for journalism students in different Ukrainian
universities. Ukrayinska Pravda covered about one-third of costs and funded the publishing of about 1,200 copies.
The share of books printed
using IRF’s money will be distributed among students and books
funded by Ukrayinska Pravda will be available for sale.
The American Saga of Pavlo
Lazarenko will be officially presented on June 27 at the Ukrainian
Institute of London and then in different cities in Ukraine.
Pavlo Lazarenko was
Ukrainian prime-minister in 1996-97. In 1998 the Prosecutor General’s
office opened a criminal case against Lazarenko for the theft of
state property on especially large scale. Next year he moved to the
U.S.
In 2006 the District Court
of the Northern District of California found him guilty of
money-laundering. He was sentenced to 97 months in prison and a fine
of $ 10 million for this and other crimes. He was released on
November 1, 2012, but almost immediately went back to jail due to the
uncertainty of his status in the U.S.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Kateryna Kapliuk can be reached at
[email protected].
