Editor's Note: This Kyiv Post story from Dec. 4, 1996, chronicles the arrest of ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, one of the most corrupt politicians in Ukraine's history and its prime minister under President Leonid Kuchma from 1996 to 1997. Lazarenko was convicted in the United states in August 2006 and sentenced to prison for money laundering, wire fraud and extortion. He is believed to have embezzled at least $200 million from Ukraine.
Pavlo Lazarenko, a former prime minister and one of the country’s most powerful opposition figures, was arrested on Wednesday in Switzerland in connection with a money-laundering investigation prompted by the Ukrainian government.
Lazarenko, leader of the Hromada party and its faction in parliament, was detained by customs officials near the northern Swiss city of Basle as he crossed by car from France into Switzerland using a Panamanian passport.
From Basle he was transferred to Geneva, where an investigating judge sanctioned his arrest.
Swiss authorities had received 20 separate requests from Ukraine for legal aid in tracking down money Lazarenko had allegedly stashed away in Swiss banks, Switzerland’s Office of Police Affairs told The Associated Press.
In November, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuericher Zeitung reported that $40 million in Lazarenko’s bank accounts had been frozen in different cantons of Switzerland.
On Thursday, Swiss investigating magistrate Laurent Kasper-Ansermet confirmed that some bank accounts had been frozen in a money-laundering inquiry, sparked partly by a request for judicial assistance from Ukraine.
‘He will be questioned Friday morning in connection with an inquiry in Geneva into the laundering of dirty money,’ Kasper-Ansermet told the AP. He did not elaborate.
As a member of parliament, Lazarenko is immune from prosecution in Ukraine.
Since Lazarenko emerged from a brief hiatus from politics as Hromada leader, the state media has repeatedly accused him of corruption. The charges center around Lazarenko’s granting preferential status to the gas distribution giant Unified Energy Systems while prime minister.
The same charges were made widely in Western media while Lazarenko was prime minister, which some observers say helped convince Kuchma to sack Lazarenko in July 1997.
Lazarenko has been repeatedly accused of transferring large sums of public money to his bank accounts abroad.
On Thursday, former prosecutor general Oleh Lytvak told the 1+1 television channel that during his term in that office (July 1997 to January 1998) he received information that Lazarenko had deposited $1.7 billion abroad.
On Thursday morning, after national radio and television reported Lazarenko’s arrest, the parliamentary faction of Lazarenko’s Hromada party issued a statement suggesting the story was fabricated.
‘We consider the twisted information, which is not confirmed by official sources, another provocation and a part of the campaign to destroy the opposition and its leaders,’ the statement read.
The statement said that Lazarenko was in Brussels negotiating with the European Union on behalf of the Ukrainian parliament.
The faction demanded that parliament create a commission to investigate how ‘such misinformation appeared in the mass media.’
The arrest follows a series of attacks on Hromada.
General Prosecutor Mykhailo Potebenko recently requested deputies to lift Lazarenko’s immunity from prosecution so that he could institute the criminal proceedings. Potebenko said he had enough material to start a criminal case, but he didn’t give any details.
Lazarenko has repeatedly denied the allegations, accusing Kuchma and his allies of trying to blacken his name. In October, he alleged that authorities were plotting to kill him.
