Hearings on Pavlo Lazarenko case begin in San Francisco

Preliminary hearings on the case of Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko who was charged with laundering $114 million, have started in San Francisco, USA. The hearings were opened in the presence of the judges of California state, lawyers, and the jury. The defense and prosecution interviewed potential jurors. The court hearings in San Francisco will be supplied with simultaneous Russian translation and conducted by Judge Martin Jenkins. The prosecution will be presented by the chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force in the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, Martha Borsch. Lazarenko will be defended by renowned American lawyer Dennis Riordan. The start of the hearings with the participation of all sides is scheduled for March 1.

Pavlo Lazarenko claims the money was not laundered but legally transferred through the banks. “Unless there’s a crime in the Ukraine, there’s nothing he did wrong in the US,” Lazarenko’s attorney Daniel Horowitz told AFP after the hearing. Prosecutors argue that the money was part of $US 450 million that disappeared in a complex loan scheme involving Russian oil giant Gazprom and Ukraine state companies. At the same time, Lazarenko’s lawyers argue that, under Ukraine law and practices, the money was acquired legally, and so does not fall under US money- laundering statutes. “He played by the rules as they existed in Ukraine at the time,” Horowitz said.

It is not improbable that People’s Deputy Yuliya Tymoshenko will also witness at the Lazarenko trial. This was stated by her attorney Viktor Shvets at a February 17 press conference in Kyiv. Mr. Shvets also said that a week before Yuliya Tymoshenko was summoned to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office to familiarize her with an invitation from the Justice Department of the US to give testimony at the trial. According to the attorney, Mrs. Tymoshenko stated once again that she has no objections against testifying at the trial. However, she demands that the US government guaranteed her personal safety and a chance to freely return to Ukraine. Mr. Shvets said that all Mrs. Tymoshenko’s proposals were passed to the American side, with no further proposals coming from the US so far, reports Interfax Ukraine. Recall that criminal proceedings against Yuliya Tymoshenko have also been started in Ukraine. In the words of Prosecutor General Hennady Vasyliev, it is investigated together with the Lazarenko case. As previously reported by the Prosecutor General, the joint file consists of 7000 volumes, 2000 of which deal with Mrs. Tymoshenko.