The main witness in the high-profile criminal case against Yulia Tymoshenko told the court she ordered and paid for the 1996 murder of a business rival. The statement, which is expected to become the prosecutors' main argument, comes amid a growing controversy around the witness.
The current trial is the latest case launched against former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which many in the West see as politically motivated. The European Union has repeatedly called to end the selective application of justice if Ukraine is to have any hopes of signing an Association Agreement in November this year.
Despite progress on other requirements authorities have ruled out a pardon of Tymoshenko until her ongoing trials, including for the gangland-style murder of Donetsk businessman and parliament member
Yevhen Shcherban, are over.
The latest developments do not bode well for Tymoshenko. Petro Kirichenko,
a close associate of former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, said he
personally passed cash and made banking transfers that paid for the murder, but claimed he only had “suspicions” and no
prior knowledge of what the money was for.
“I know that the order (for the hit)
came from Tymoshenko and Lazarenko,” he told the court in Kyiv on
May 15 via a video link from the United States. He also said the idea
came from Tymoshenko, but said his knowledge of the case comes from
Oleksandr Milchenko, a former convicted criminal who conducted the
murder, and has no documentary proof
supporting his claim.
Some of Kirichenko’s statements
contradict his earlier testimonies about Tymoshenko’s role in the
murder, including those he gave to Ukrainian and American
investigators in San Francisco in 2001 when questioned in a different
case.
Tymoshenko’s lawyers believe that
Kirichenko was bullied into testifying against Tymoshenko by
Ukraine’s prosecutors, a charge they deny.
Shcherban, a
member of the Liberal Party’s executive committee and a Verkhovna
Rada deputy, was shot dead at the Donetsk airport on his arrival from
Moscow on November 3, 1996. The gunmen fled the scene by car.
Shcherban, his wife and a mechanic died on
the spot from gunshot wounds. The plane’s flight engineer died later
in the hospital.
Previously, General Prosecutor Viktor
Pshonka claimed Tymoshenko paid $2.3
million from her accounts, while Lazarenko
paid another half a million in cash for the murder
and said their business rivalry was the main motive. If
convicted, Tymoshenko faces life in prison, in addition to the seven
years she has been serving since 2011 for brokering a gas deal with
Russia.
Prosecution of Tymoshenko has been
denounced in the West as political, designed to remove her as a key
political opponent. The European Court for Human Rights ruled
recently that her detention in 2011 was for reasons “other” than
criminal prosecution.
Moreover, several key witnesses who had
already testified in the ongoing murder case, said they either had no
knowledge of Tymoshenko’s involvement in the murder, or said she was
innocent.
In 1996, Tymoshenko was a major gas
trader in Ukraine, running a company under the patronage of former
Prime Minister Lazarenko, who is currently in a U.S. jail awaiting a
potential extradition. Several witnesses in the murder case have also
described their relationship as “intimate.”
Kirichenko was Lazarenko’s confidante
and keeper of most of his money in the 1990s. He said Lazarenko only
had two bank accounts, and the rest of his massive fortune went
through Kirichenko’s accounts. “All the financial operations were
basically conducted through me,” he told the court.
He said Tymoshenko’s
Dnipropetrovsk-based United Energy Systems of Ukraine received many
preferences when Lazarenko occupied top positions in the central
government, but in 1996 she ran into a conflict with company in
Donetsk controlled by Shcherban, also a gas
trader.
“I know from Lazarenko’s words that
she was not allowed to directly supply gas (to companies based in the
Donetsk region), but only to the border of the oblast,”
Kirichenko said, explaining the motives of the murder.
His testimony, contradicts earlier
statements by two key representatives of
the Industrial Union of Donbas (ISD), founded by Shcherban. Serhiy
Taruta, a multimillionaire and key member of ISD who was in charge
of its day-to-day operations, said by late 1996 all business
conflicts were resolved.
“There was a regular business
conflict… After we agreed, we developed a normal, working
relationship,” he told the same Court of Appeals in Kyiv on April
2. His testimony was later corroborated by another top member of the
same business group, Vitaliy Haiduk.
Haiduk said the gas supply agreement
between the ISD and UESU was signed on December 30, 1995.
Kirichenko, however, insisted that
prior to the murder Lazarenko told him that
Tymoshenko was “in grave danger” because of business conflicts,
and asked if he knew of a “criminal authority” who could help.
Kirichenko hooked him up with Milchenko, who had just come out of
prison.
Kirichenko said he later
received an order from Lazarenko to pay $3 million to Milchenko, and
$500,000 directly from Lazarenko in cash as the first installment. He
said he believed at the time that it was “for Tymoshenko’s
security.”
“But when I found out
from the mass media that Shcherban was murdered, I had a bad
premonition,” he told the court. He said he was later approached by
Milchenko with complaints that both Tymoshenko and Lazarenko were
hiding from him, and failing to meet their financial obligation.
Kirichenko quoted
Milchenko as telling him he “had done the job, got rid of
Shcherban.” Milchenko himself died in 1997 under mysterious
circumstances.
Kirichenko said he made
the rest of the payment from his own offshore account on May 20th,
1997 at the order of Lazarenko after he raised the issue with him. He
said he had received the money for payment from Tymoshenko’s account.
However, during the
cross-examination, Tymoshenko’s top defender Serhiy Vlasenko said the
account in question had no contributions from Tymoshenko’s companies
until eight days later. Moreover, he said there is no link between
the money paid by Tymoshenko and payment for murder – a key piece
of evidence prosecutors rely on.
Moreover, Vlasenko quoted
an earlier statement from Kirichenko who had said in 2001 that his
financial dealings with Milchenko were “an investment” into a
joint agriculture business in Ukraine.
Before the hearing,
Vlasenko told Kyiv Post that Kirichenko was living in the US under a
witness protection program after testifying against Lazarenko in a
money-laundering case. He said his testimony in this murder case does
not only incriminate him, but violates the terms of his deal with the
US government.
“The deal with Americans
does not cover issues related to murder,” he said. The US Embassy
had no comment on this issue.
There is evidence that
Kirichenko may have been pressured into testifying against
Tymoshenko. His wife Isabella, a cancer survivor, was detained in
Ukraine in 2011 and kept in pre-trial detention for several months
for alleged document fraud while trying to sell an apartment in Kyiv.
She got very sick in prison and lost 12 kilos of weight.
She was later released and
told Kyiv Post in a telephone interview from the United States that
she was pressured into persuading her husband to “answer some
questions” in the Tymoshenko case.
After Kirichenko agreed to
cooperate with prosecution, some of his assets in Ukraine had been
released, and several criminal cases against him closed. When
questioned about these episodes in court on May 15, Kirichenko
refused to give any details.
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at gorchinskaya@kyivpost.com
