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Yulia Tymoshenko
Facing immense pressure from the Western countries, Yanukovych said that the law that served as a conviction for Tymoshenko was outdated and should be changed, and that it has been part of administrative offences and political cases all over the world.
The parliament gave last week its initial approval to a bill that would decriminalize some economic offences but there was no specification of the article under which Yulia Tymoshenko was sentenced a few days ago to seven years in prison.
The parliament is expected to consider it again, and analysts consider that it could be reviewed to include this particular article.
It wouldn’t necessarily help Tymoshenko’s case, considering that the Ukrainian secret services said on Thursday that a case of embezzlement is being built against Tymoshenko, in which she is suspected of having embezzled $405 million funds at a time when she was president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine in the 1990s.
The criminal probe was said by the Ukrainian secret service head of investigations Ivan Derevyanko to have been linked to another former prime minister, Pavlo Lazarenko, who was prime minister at the time and was an ally to Tymoshenko.
Lazarenko served as a prime minister of Ukraine from 1996 to 1997 and since 2006 has been serving time in prison in a federal penitentiary in the United States after being convicted of embezzlement and money laundering.
Derevyanko said that the main investigation department of the service he ran opened an investigation against Lazarenko and Tymoshenko and that the latter could spend 12 years in prison if she were to be found guilty.
Tymoshenko is accused that she reassigned a debt her company was having to the Russian defense ministry of $405 million to the Ukrainian budget and then transfered the sum to her and Lazarenko.
The case is especially important as it alleges a grave act of corruption. Tymoshenko was the head of the company in the 1990s, known to the Ukrainians and the people all over Eastern Europe as a period of total chaos and rampant corruption.
According to the Ukrainian secret service investigation, after making sure that she obtained a guarantee that the money would be paid to the Russian defense ministry, she transferred the sum in her cards and the accounts of former PM Lazarenko.
The investigators said that she was involved in opaque schemes to transfer the money obtained in oil industry from Russia to a Swiss account.
The trials she is involved into were separated by there are people in Yanukovych who linked them. Thus the energy minister and a leading figure of the Regions Party said that with a debt to the Russians of $450 million Tymoshenko felt compelled to sign the gas contract in 2009, by which, according to the former president of the state’s testimony, Ukraine paid $360 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas (after a Russian discount from $450 to $360), when the contract could have been signed for $100 per 1,000 cubic meters.
The case is said to have been opened after a complaint filed by Ukrainian PM Mykola Azarov, and Russian defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov. The Russian defense ministry had no comment.
Tymoshenko was convicted earlier this week in a trial in which she had been accused of exceeding her powers. Since August, Tymoshenko was held in contempt of court, after accusing the court of being biased and politically motivated.
Her condemnation drew a violent criticism from the European Union and the United States, but also from the Russian prime minister. While EU warned that this move would be extremely prejudicial for the European future of Ukraine, the Russian prime minister said that the conviction shows the “anti-Russian character” of the sentence.
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