Lawmaker and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has officially declared a bizarre money transfer of Hr 148.35 million ($5.5 million) from a U.S. firm.
Tymoshenko, leader of the Batkivshchyna party, which has 24 seats in parliament, said in her asset declaration that she received the money on April 24 from U.S. law firm Reid Collins & Tsai LLP as part of a pre-trial settlement of compensation for political repressions against her in 2011-2014.
However, Tymoshenko did not reveal anything about the lawsuit, including who paid the settlement.
“I will give no more details because of U.S. laws concerning legal restrictions in the case,” Tymoshenko wrote on Facebook on May 4.
Tymoshenko did not respond to a request for comment, and her press office declined to elaborate on the transfer. The law firm also did not respond to emailed requests for comment and left phone calls unanswered.
In 2011, Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years in prison on abuse of power charges in a case that was later recognized as politically motivated by Ukrainian and European authorities. At the time, she was the main political foe of then-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Tymoshenko said that the payment she received was “proof that her imprisonment was a political vendetta against her” and that the U.S. “is a genuine rule of law state.”
However, her secretiveness immediately aroused suspicions that the transaction could be something other than a legal settlement.
Experts interviewed by the Kyiv Post were unanimous that the transaction was suspicious, although it will only be clear whether the transfer was legal after more information is available.
The experts who share this view include Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board; Oleksandra Ustinova, formerly a lawyer at the Anti-Corruption Action Center and a current lawmaker for singer Sviatoslav Vakarchuk’s Golos party; Vitaly Tytych, ex-coordinator of the Public Integrity Council judicial watchdog, and Sergii Gorbatuk, a former top investigator who used to investigate both Tymoshenko and Yanukovych.
“I share the doubts that are being raised (about the transfer),” Roman Kuybida, deputy head of the Center of Policy and Legal Reform. “I don’t see a logical explanation for this transaction.”
Shabunin said he had not heard of any other people being compensated for political persecution in such a way.
Tytych noted, however, that it is common to make out-of-court settlements secret.
The firm
Reid Collins & Tsai LLP, the firm that transferred the alleged settlement to Tymoshenko, is a boutique law firm with offices in Austin, New York, Dallas and Washington, D.C.
It is not known to represent any Ukrainian citizens. It has registered as a lobbyist twice, in 2010-2011, representing clients in Mexico and Columbia. In 2012, it represented singer Shakira’s ex-boyfriend, who unsuccessfully sued her for damages. In November 2019, Law.com reported that Reid Collins & Tsai was paying its employees unusually big bonuses for a small law firm.
The firm’s only other known connection to Tymoshenko is through Serhiy Vlasenko, a lawmaker from Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party and one of her closest allies. He also declared receiving Hr 133 million (almost $5 million) from Reid Collins & Tsai LLP in 2019.
Vlasenko did not respond to a request for comment. He declared the transfers from the firm simply as “foreign income.”
As of the date of publication, PACER, an electronic public access service for U.S. federal court documents, contained no fresh court cases to which either Tymoshenko or Vlasenko were a party.
U.S. and Tymoshenko
Tymoshenko tried to receive compensation for her imprisonment through a U.S. court at least once before. In 2011, she filed a civil lawsuit accusing her political opponents of running a U.S.-based money-laundering enterprise that led to her imprisonment.
The key defendant in the case was oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Tymoshenko claimed that he had laundered money in the U.S. to help Yanukovych fund a campaign to imprison her, including bribing the prosecutors in Ukraine.
A New York-based federal judge dismissed the case in September 2015, finding Tymoshenko’s case not convincing.
Also, in 2014, Ukrainian prosecutors opened an investigation into the alleged embezzlement of more than $1 million in state funds through a report prepared by another U.S. law firm, Skadden, to whitewash the prosecution of Tymoshenko. The report was commissioned by U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice under Yanukovych. In 2019, Manafort was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison in the United States for tax fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy.
In 2015, Yanukovych’s justice minister, Oleksandr Lavrynovych, was charged in the case along with his deputy and accountant. The Lavrynovych case was sent to trial in 2016. The case is ongoing.
