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Kyiv’s Pechersk Court on Dec. 11 released ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili from custody, rejecting prosecutors’ motion to place him under house arrest.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the court to support Saakashvili.
After Saakashvili was released, he marched with his supporters to his house on Kostyolna Street near Maidan Nezalezhnosti.
Davit Sakvarelidze, a senior official of Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces, said, however, that the authorities were planning to try to arrest Saakashvili again on other trumped-up charges.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on Dec. 11 that prosecutors would appeal the court’s ruling.
Lutsenko has accused Saakashvili, the leader of recent protests, of getting funding from oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, to finance rallies against the authorities and plot a coup d’etat. However, formally Saakashvili has been charged only with “complicity in an organized crime group.”
Saakashvili believes the arrest to be a political vendetta by President Petro Poroshenko and says the criminal case is fabricated.
Saakashvili was arrested on Dec. 8 and brought to the Security Service of Ukraine’s detention facility on Askoldiv Lane. On Dec. 10, thousands of protesters demanded his release and Poroshenko’s impeachment.
“I have a deja vu,” Saakashvili said during the hearing. “For the first time I was transported to the same KGB detention facility (on Askoldiv Lane) in 1986 and accused of criticizing the Soviet authorities and plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime. These prosecutors are young but they speak the same language – the same Soviet style, the same KGB. Has nothing changed in this country since then?”
Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, lawmaker Dmytro Dobrodomov, Batkivshchyna lawmakers Igor Lutsenko and Alyona Shkrum, Yuriy Derevyanko, a lawmaker from Saakashvili’s party, and former Defense Minister Anatoly Hrytsenko vouched for Saakashvili during the hearing.
Saakashvili’s lawyers said all three attempts to arrest him – on Dec. 5, Dec. 6 and Dec. 8 – were illegal because no arrest warrants were presented. The prosecutors denied accusations of wrongdoing but did not deny that there were no warrants.
The prosecutors referred to alleged testimony given by unidentified agents “Hare” and Wolf” to make their case.
Saakashvili’s lawyers said that they doubted the testimony because of the agents’ unidentified nature. They also accused the prosecutors of falsifying and backdating the alleged evidence because the alleged events to which the agents referred as having happened in the past took place after the agents mentioned them, according to the prosecutors’ documents.
The lawyers also argued that Saakashvili’s arrest was the culmination of what they deem to be political repressions that started with the cancellation of his Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko in July and targeted over 600 people.
Saakashvili believes the cancellation of his citizenship violates Ukrainian and internationl law, the Constitution and due process.
Meanwhile, five Saakashvili supporters have been charged in criminal cases linked to his crossing of the border in September. One of them, Oleksandr Burtsev, is under arrest, and three others are under house arrest. The authorities say Saakashvili crossed the border illegally, while he denies the charge.
Moreover, seven Georgian associates of Saakashvili, a co-organizer of the protests near the Verkhovna Rada, were deported to their homeland on Nov. 17 and Oct. 21 in what they say was an illegal operation without due process or any court warrants. Several of them say they were beaten.
The authorities deny accusations of wrongdoing.
To prove Saakashvili’s alleged guilt, Lutsenko has played what he claimed were an intercepted phone conversation allegedly between Saakashvili and Kurchenko and also alleged conversations between Severion Dangadze, an official of Saakashvili’s party, and an unidentified associate of Kurchenko. Saakashvili said that the tapes had been faked.
Five lawyers said that they saw no evidence of a crime in the recordings, even if they are genuine. They included Vitaly Tytych; Mykola Khavronyuk, a law professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia investigations unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office; criminal law expert Hanna Malyar, and Halya Coynash, a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
The Saakashvili case was initially opened as part of another controversial case linked to the confiscation of $1.5 billion by a Kramatorsk court. Critics have dismissed the confiscation hearings as a political show, as both the investigation and the trial were conducted in secrecy and over just two weeks, and the ruling was not published.
The prosecutors claimed that the confiscated money was linked to Kurchenko. But in November the National Anti-Corruption Bureau said $157 million of that amount belonged to fugitive lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko’s firms, not Kurchenko, and that it was stolen by unknown people after being confiscated and transferred to Oshchadbank.
Kurchenko on Dec. 11 denied any links to Saakashvili, saying he would file a lawsuit against Lutsenko for accusing him of financing the ex-Georgian president.
He also said that he bought UMH media group from Poroshenko in 2013 for $400 million, and no taxes were paid on the sale in Ukraine.
Formally the group sold by Boris Lozhkin, a close associate of Poroshenko and later his chief of staff, but Poroshenko has been accused of having an informal stake in the group. In 2014 Austrian authorities opened a money laundering investigation into the sale. Poroshenko and Lozhkin denied the accusations of wrongdoing.
