Ukrainian Nadra Bank and Swiss-registered RosUkrEnergo, both owned by Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash, are asking a U.S. court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The defendants in the civil lawsuit say the court lacks jurisdiction over these institutions and that the companies have committed no wrongdoing.
In April 2011,
Tymoshenko
filed a lawsuit in a New York district court accusing Firtash,
gas trader RosUkrEnergo and Ukraine’s political leadership of
racketeering and defrauding Ukrainians of billion-dollar volumes of
natural gas by manipulating an international arbitration court ruling
in Stockholm in 2010.
The Stockholm-based
arbitration court obliged Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state energy monopoly,
to return RosUkrEnergo 11 billion cubic meters of gas and also pay it
a penalty of 1.1 billion cubic meters of gas, as stipulated by the
contract.
Tymoshenko is currently
serving a a seven-year prison sentence after a judge in Kyiv a year
ago this month convicted her for abuse of office as prime minister
for a gas deal she negotiated with Russia in 2009. The contract
removed Firtash’s RosUkrEnergo as an intermediary from the
lucrative gas trade between Ukraine and Russia.
The criminal case against
Tymoshenko is seen in the West and among many Ukrainians as political
retribution designed to eliminate the two-time prime minister as a
Yanukovych rival. She came within 3.5 percentage points of beating
him in the 2010 presidential election, during which he refused to
debate her. Tymoshenko blame Yanukovych for jailing her, but
Yanukovych said her conviction shows that the rule of law is working
in Ukraine and that the judiciary is independent of him.
Firtash
is a close ally of Yanukovych and allegedly part of the ‘gas
lobby’. Since Yanukovych
came to power in February 2010, Firtash’s businesses has
flourished. Last year, Korrespondent magazine estimated in 2010 alone
that Firtash’s wealth surged by more than five times, reaching
$2.25 billion.
Firtash’s press service
did not respond to the Kyiv Post inquiry whether he received the
summons to the U.S. court and whether he or his legal representatives
plan to react in court to the pending legal action.
In the past, Firtash
said he never
received any notification of
a legal action from any courts in New York, according to his press
service. He also said he believes Tymoshenko has no grounds for
challenging such a decision and dismissed any wrongdoing.
Later last December,
Tymoshenko amended her complaint to add more defendants, including
Firtash’s Nadra Bank, accusing it of being used as a tool for
suspicious money transfers, an allegation dismissed by Nadra.
According to the
copy of the motion to dismiss the amended complained, filed to the
court by the Nadra Bank in early September, the bank says that in her
complaint that Tymoshenko “fails to identify a single illegal or
suspicious transfer, or any transfer at all made by Nadra Bank.”
The bank’s legal
representatives state in the motion that, by suing Nadra Bank,
Tymoshenko is trying to destroy the financial institution’s
reputation “in her political proxy war against President
Yanukovych” and concludes that the legal action against Nadra
should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction basis.
Similarly,
RosUkrEnergo’s motion contends the claim should be dismissed for the
lack of jurisdiction and adds that Tymoshenko’s claims “do not
properly allege standing, or make specific allegations of RUE’s
individual participation in the alleged fraud.”
Tymoshenko’s legal
representatives in the court opposed RosUkrEnergo’s motions to
dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that “RUE’s arguments are unavailing
and its motions to dismiss should be denied.”
Kyiv Post staff
writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]
