“We have been Mr. Akhmetov’s defense attorneys for more than eight years and we have conducted investigations into these false claims exhaustively, jointly with the Kroll consulting company. We have not found any proof suggesting that Akhmetov was involved in Scherban’s or other businessmen’s killings. To be honest, some of the businessmen killed in the 1990s were Mr. Akhmetov’s close friends,” the company said in a press release circulated on Friday.
The company also said that an extensive investigation has been carried out “in reaction to false and misleading statements by Ukrainian officials about the transfer of commercial and industrial assets to Mr. Akhmetov’s management.”
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“This work included interviews, including with the killed businessmen’s partners, managers, relatives and heirs, as well an analysis of thousands of documents. Our conclusions will be fully and officially presented in a public format in Ukraine soon. Pending the publication, we will continue to insist that all of the recent claims that Akhmetov was involved in crimes almost 20 years ago are untrue and are not based on facts,” the lawyers said.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Pshonka said on Jan. 18 that the Prosecutor General’s Office had completed the investigation into Scherban’s murder. Tymoshenko was handed a notice saying that she is suspected of organizing Scherban’s murder for mercenary purposes in collusion with former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko.
Tymoshenko and Lazarenko rejected the accusations.
On Jan. 22, Tymoshenko’s defense attorney Serhiy Vlasenko announced Tymoshenko’s version of Scherban’s murder. She said in a letter that “in no other region was the number of criminal feuds so large as in the Donetsk region in the 1990s.”
She claimed that she had been accused of organizing Scherban’s murder in order to jail her for life.
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