Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Jan. 11 said he would lobby for the introduction of personal sanctions in the West against Ukrainian top officials involved in corruption, in measures similar to the Magnitsky list legislation of the United States and other countries.
The Magnitsky list targets Russian officials implicated in the murder of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.
Specifically, Saakashvili was referring to measures against allies of President Petro Poroshenko who have been accused of being involved in an alleged $1.5 billion corruption scheme run by the president’s predecessor, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Saakashvili, who was speaking at a hearing on his house arrest at the Kyiv Court of Appeals, said his associate, David Sakvarelidze, a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, and lawyer Mykola Siry would investigate the allegations of the involvement of Poroshenko’s associates in the scheme. The court postponed hearings on Saakashvili’s house arrest until 10 a.m. on Jan. 19.
According to a secret court ruling leaked to the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera that was made public on Jan. 10, investment bank ICU, which was co-founded by Poroshenko’s banker and confidant Makar Paseniuk and former central bank chief Valeria Hontareva, was implicated in the scheme.
Poroshenko’s critics argue that this is why a March 28, 2017 ruling by Kramatorsk City Court, which confiscated $1.5 billion in assets linked to Yanukovych, was made secret.
Hontareva and ICU, which provides bank services to Poroshenko, denied accusations that it was involved in Yanukovych’s corruption schemes. The Presidential Administration said it could not comment on the issue.
Lawyers and anti-corruption activists have argued that the Kramatorsk court’s ruling does not contain any evidence or legal grounds for the confiscation and may result in Ukrainian authorities returning the confiscated funds to the offshore firms that held them.
One of the prosecutors in charge of the confiscation case, Oleksandr Hovorushchak, is also leading the criminal case against Saakashvili.
Saakashvili accused the prosecutors in the confiscation case of being criminals.
“These prosecutors are accomplices in the biggest crime in the history of modern Ukraine,” Saakashvili said at the courthouse. “I accuse them of being criminals. I accuse (Prosecutor General Yuriy) Lutsenko of being a criminal… I accuse them of complicity in Yanukovych’s crimes and participating in an organized crime group that has been robbing Ukraine.”
The Prosecutor General’s Office denied accusations of wrongdoing.
Saakashvili also promised that those implicated in the $1.5 billion corruption scheme and those covering up for them would be punished.
“Who must try whom, and who should be behind this glass (in the defendant’s cage)?” Saakashvili asked the prosecutors in the courtroom. “I promise you that you will be jailed.”
House arrest
The delay of the hearings on placing Saakashvili under house arrest was attributed to the fact that not all of the 12 lawmakers who vouched for him could be present at the hearing, due to the holiday season. Previously hearings on Saakashvili’s house arrest have been delayed twice.
Lutsenko has accused Saakashvili of accepting funding from fugitive oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of Yanukovych, to finance anti-government demonstrations and plot a coup d’etat.
Saakashvili, who was arrested on Dec. 8, believes that the case is a political vendetta by Poroshenko. The prosecutors’ alleged evidence against Saakashvili was dismissed by independent lawyers as being very weak, and he was released by Pechersk Court Judge Larysa Tsokol on Dec. 11.
Tsokol ruled on Dec. 11 that Saakashvili’s detention by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), prosecutors and police without a court warrant and any other legal grounds on Dec. 5 was unlawful. Saakashvili, who was freed by hundreds of his supporters on the same day, believes the detention to be a kidnapping.
To prove Saakashvili’s alleged guilt, Lutsenko has played what he claimed were an intercepted phone conversation allegedly between Saakashvili and Kurchenko and also alleged conversations between Severion Dangadze, an official of Saakashvili’s party, and an unidentified associate of Kurchenko. Saakashvili said that the tapes had been faked.
It is not clear what the alleged conversation between Kurchenko and Saakashvili is about, and it contains no details or descriptions of any criminal activities.
Five independent lawyers said that they saw no evidence of a crime in the recordings, even if they are genuine. They included Vitaly Tytych; Mykola Khavronyuk, a law professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia investigations unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office; criminal law expert Hanna Malyar, and Halya Coynash, a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
Georgian court
A Tbilisi court on Jan. 5 sentenced Saakashvili to three years in prison in absentia on abuse of power charges.
Saakashvili said that although his extradition or deportation is banned under Ukrainian law, Ukrainian authorities could illegally use the Georgian court decision as an excuse to extradite or deport him.
In Georgia, Saakashvili is accused of abusing his power by pardoning four police officers convicted in 2006 of murdering Georgian banker Sandro Girgvliani. In 2008 Saakashvili cut the prison terms of about 170 convicted law enforcement and military officers, including the four convicts in the Girgvliani case. The pardons happened after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008.
Saakashvili dismissed the accusations as absurd, arguing that his right to pardon them was not constitutionally limited.
Deportation
Meanwhile, the Kyiv District Administrative Court rejected Saakashvili’s application for political asylum on Jan. 3 – a decision he said the authorities could also use as an excuse to deport or extradite him.
Under Ukrainian law, those applying for political asylum cannot be deported or extradited. Saakashvili’s lawyers said that they would appeal against the court ruling within a month, and that any attempts to extradite or deport him during the appeal stage would be illegal.
In applying for political asylum, Saakashvili has argued that the criminal cases against him in his native Georgia are politically motivated.
Ukrainian authorities deemed Georgia’s criminal cases against him to be politically motivated when they rejected Tbilisi’s extradition requests for Saakashvili in 2014 and 2015.
Saakashvili’s lawyers have also argued that he cannot be deported or extradited, regardless of the status of his asylum bid, since it is unlawful to deport or extradite permanent stateless residents of Ukraine.
In addition, the fact that Saakashvili is under investigation in a criminal case in Ukraine also makes it illegal to deport or extradite him, his lawyers say.
