Two men have been arrested while trying to pay a Hr 5 million ($185,000) bribe to presidential candidate Yuriy Tymoshenko to pull out of the presidential election race, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on March 6.
The man has the same last name and initials as Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the top candidates in the March 31 presidential election and the leader of the 20-member Batkivshchyna parliamentary faction. She earlier claimed that her namesake is a spoiler candidate who only runs to draw away some of her votes, which he denied.
Lutsenko said that the arrested men were allegedly bribing the candidate on behalf of Valeriy Dubil, a parliamentarian from the Batkivshchyna faction. Dubil didn’t respond to Kyiv Post before the publication of the article.
Yuriy Tymoshenko, a lawmaker from the 81-member pro-government People’s Front and relatively unknown to the wider public, became famous after he declared his intention to run in the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled to take place on March 31.
According to a recent poll, Yulia Tymoshenko is the third in the race with the 16.2 percent support, whereas Yuriy Tymoshenko has less than 0.01 percent.
On Feb. 8, during a TV talk show on the 1+1 channel, the former prime minister accused incumbent President Petro Poroshenko of using the other Tymoshenko to draw votes away from her. Poroshenko’s campaign denied it.
“This is what they expect, in such a fraudulently humiliating way – to take some percents from me in the elections and transfer them to a person who has nothing to do with the presidency,” Yulia Tymoshenko said.
Now, a month later, authorities arrested two individuals attempting to bribe Yuriy Tymoshenko to have him drop out of the race. One of those arrested was Taras Kostanchuk, who during the 2014 presidential elections worked with pro-Russian lawmaker and Opposition Platform presidential candidate Yuriy Boyko.
Kostanchuk later served as a local councilor for the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko in Vyshneve, a suburb to the southeast of Kyiv. He left the council in 2015.
Kostanchuk claimed that the operation was a planned setup by Lutsenko and the presidential administration. Lutsenko has openly backed Tymoshenko’s rival and his boss Poroshenko who is seeking the second term.
According to Kostanchuk, the People’s Front Tymoshenko asked him to help pay off the Hr 2.5 million loan that he took to pay his presidential registration fee. When Kostanchuk brought the money, he said he was arrested for a bribery attempt. He didn’t why he was detained with Hr 5 million while the registration fee was twice smaller.
Yuriy Tymoshenko, in a comment to the BBC, stated that since declaring his intention to run for president he has been threatened numerous times by other politicians. He said that when he was offered a Hr 5 million ($185,000) bribe to withdraw his candidacy from the upcoming elections, he reported it to the police.
This isn’t the first accusation of dirty play against Tymoshenko that comes from the law enforcement.
In February, authorities said Tymoshenko’s representatives were building an illegal network of paid agents across Ukraine to help her win the election. Around the same time, Lutsenko asked anti-corruption prosecutors to look into allegations that Tymoshenko was using American lobbyists’ services without reporting it.
