The ex-prime minister, convicted in America on money laundering charges, remains a symbol of 1990s corruption and the injustice of Ukraine’s legal system.
If Ukrainian prosecutors ever get their hands on former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, they say they have enough evidence to try him for murder, abuse of office, extortion, fraud, embezzlement and theft of state property.
“The evidence is enough to send this criminal case to the court,” said Maksym Yakubovskiy, a prosecutor investigating the Lazarenko case in Ukraine.
But Lazarenko, former President Leonid Kuchma’s prime minister from 1996-1997, remains imprisoned in America for laundering money illegitimately earned in Ukraine.
On April 10, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld his conviction on eight counts of money-laundering, but overturned the guilty verdict on six counts.
He is slowly nearing the end of the line on a long and winding appeals process, but is expected to spend several more years in U.S. federal prison.
He is currently being held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, a low-security prison housing female offenders. It is located 20 miles southeast of Oakland, California. But Lazarenko is expected to be moved to a different prison after his sentence is recalculated following the appeals court ruling.
All of this legal maneuvering – plus the lack of a formal extradition treaty between the United States and Ukraine – is keeping Lazarenko out of reach of Ukrainian prosecutors, who claim they are sincere about wanting to see him brought to justice. “But we can’t send the case to the court as, according to Ukraine’s legislation, we don’t have judgment in absentia,” Yakubovskiy said.
On Sept. 25, President Victor Yushchenko signaled his intention to extradite Lazarenko presumably to stand trial, and negotiations are said to have continued since then between Ukrainian prosecutors and U.S. authorities.
“The United States refuses to give Lazarenko to Ukraine because of the absence of extradition agreement between the two nations,” Yakubovskiy said. The U.S embassy in Kyiv confirmed that, without an extradition agreement, the ex-prime minister won’t be sent home. But Yakubovskiy is still hopeful. He notes that “Ukraine [has] several times extradited to the U.S. people wanted by its enforcement bodies.”
Lazarenko’s lawyers are also still holding out hope that a higher court – the U.S. Supreme Court is the only higher court left – will overturn the conviction. There are no grounds today to talk about a final court decision and term of punishment in the U.S.,” said Maryna Dovhopola, Lazarenko’s lawyer in Ukraine.
U.S. Supreme Court intervention on behalf of Lazarenko, however, would seem to be a long shot at best.
While heading Ukraine’s government from May 1996 to June 1997, authorities believe Lazarenko siphoned at least $200 million from the nation’s coffers through elaborate schemes of extortion and kickbacks.
But that’s not the worst of the offenses he’s implicated in.
Also in Ukraine, he is accused of involvement in the 1996 murder of parliamentarian Yevhen Shcherban and the 1998 slaying of former National Bank head Vadym Hetman. He could face life in prison on a murder conviction.
Lazarenko fled a pending indictment in his homeland and arrived in New York with an outdated visa and an invalid diplomatic passport in 1999. He was prosecuted in America because some of his ill-gotten money was funneled through the United States.
In 2006, Lazarenko was sentenced to nine years in prison. He has spent a little more than four years in prison from 1999 to 2003, and then five years in house detention in the United States, presumably near San Francisco after putting up $86 million in bail.
Some hope that Lazarenko’s return to Ukraine will lead to exposure of other politicians’ involvement in corruption.
“Kuchma should be under trial together with Lazarenko,” said Hryhoriy Omelchenko, a lawmaker and ex-officer of the State Security Service, known as the SBU. Omelchenko, who headed parliament’s investigation committees on high-profile crimes, said that he has enough evidence that Kuchma knew and was involved in Lazarenko’s corrupt activities – which amounted to the selling of state favors and lucrative business concessions.
Taras Berezovets, director of Polittech political consulting firm and a one-time adviser to Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said some politicians will invoke Lazarenko’s name “to fray their opponents’ nerves.”
Some regard Lazarenko’s return as a potentially mortal threat to the political career of Tymoshenko, who was a Lazarenko protege when she was getting rich trading imported Russian natural gas.
In the 1990s, Tymoshenko led the now-defunct United Energy Systems of Ukraine, which – with Lazarenko’s patronage – won agreements to import Russian natural gas cheaply and re-sell it to a third of domestic consumers for an exorbitant (some say extortionist) mark-up price.
She always denied any wrongdoing in her relations with Lazarenko or any association with his alleged crimes, calling such charges politically motivated. Prosecutor Yakubovskiy said all cases against Tymoshenko are closed and the prosecutors have no evidence of Tymoshenko’s involvement in Lazarenko criminal activities.
For more than a decade, Lazarenko has remained not only a political football, but the only high-level politician convicted of corruption amid a sea of accusations and unsolved cases against others.
There are also signs that he’s becoming a forgotten man.
“Lazarenko is a figure from the past,” said political analysts Volodymyr Fesenko. “The rules of the game and key political figures have changed from the time he left Ukraine.”
