Prosecutors seek Oleksandr Tymoshenko

Tymoshenko said in a statement issued Aug. 22 that her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, is not hiding, has not disappeared and has not been summoned by authorities for questioning.

“Authorities led by [President Leonid] Kuchma are attempting to politically and physically annihilate their adversaries,” Tymoshenko said. “Scare tactics, sabotage or threats will not prevent me from continuing to cleanse officialdom of individuals not worthy of holding public office and representing the interests of the nation.”

The statement came in response to the decision by Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court on Aug. 19 to grant prosecutors a warrant to arrest Oleksandr Tymoshenko for allegedly ignoring repeated summonses to report for questioning about corruption accusations.

Asked about the status of the case on Aug. 27, the Prosecutor General’s Office reported that the warrant for Oleksandr Tymoshenko’s arrest was still open.

“We’re still out there looking for him,” a PGO spokeswoman said after making some inquiries.

Viktor Shvets, the Tymoshenkos’ defense attorney, meanwhile told journalists on Aug. 20 that he was not aware of any instances when Oleksander Tymoshenko had failed to appear for questioning after being duly summoned.

Oleksandr Tymoshenko was jailed in August 2000, accused of laundering $800,000 in stolen state assets while selling metals to Asian countries in the 1990s. He was released pending trial a year later.

The PGO has accused Yulia Tymoshenko and a number of her former colleagues of misappropriating billions of dollars of state funds when she ran Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU), a commercial natural gas trading company, in the mid 1990s.

Kyiv’s Shevchenko District Court is currently hearing cases against Oleksander Tymoshenko’s father and former UESU president, Hennady Tymoshenko, and Antonina Bolyura, UESU’s chief accountant. Both are being held in Kyiv’s Lukyanivka jail.

Prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for two more UESU executives, Lydia Sokolchenko and Yevhen Shago.

The four former UESU executives were arrested in the Turkish resort of Antalya in early 2002 and extradited to Ukraine.

Sokolchenko was released later due to poor health.

The Kyiv Oblast Appeals Court ordered the release of the other three on May 13. Shago was released from pre-trial confinement in Zhytomyr. Hennady Tymoshenko and Balyura were kept in jail, and new fraud charges were filed against them in June.

The Supreme Court later put the lower court’s decision on hold after prosecutors accused the judges of falsifying their decision.

Yulia Tymoshenko, who served as deputy prime minister under Viktor Yushchenko in 2000, has also been accused by the PGO of bribing former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who was charged with laundering $114 million through U.S. banks while in office. She denies the charges.