KIEV, December 30 (Itar-Tass) — Ukraine’s ex-Prime Minister, leader of the Batkivshchina (Fatherland) party Yulia Timoshenko early on Friday morning was transferred from the Lukyanovskya detention centre to a colony, Assistant Head of the Ukrainian State Penitentiary Service Igor Andrushko said without specifying the colony’s location.
The court verdict against Timoshenko has come into force, “and there is every reason for sending her to a correctional labour colony,” Minister of Justice Alexander Lavrinovich said. However, he noted that “several more criminal cases are opened against Timoshenko on which the pre-trial investigation is underway.”
Meanwhile, lawyers of ex-prime minister who was sentenced to seven years in prison are checking information circulated by some local media that Timoshenko has been convoyed to a women’s colony. An answering machine saying that “for technical reasons, the phone is not available” is responding to calls to the press service of the Ukrainian Penitentiary Service.
On December 23, the Kiev Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the Kiev Pechersk District Court made on 11 October, by which Timoshenko was sentenced to 7 years in prison for abuse of office during signing natural gas contracts with Russia. The same court on December 21 upheld Timoshenko’s re-arrest in the case of United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) she previously headed. In the case of UESU Timoshenko is accused of tax evasion, concealing foreign exchange earnings and attempted embezzlement of several hundred million dollars of budget funds.
October 11, 2011, Kiev’s Pechersky District Court sentenced Timoshenko to seven years in jail and banned her from occupying governmental positions for another three years upon finding her guilty of an abuse of occupational powers in the process of signing agreements with Russia on supplies and transits of natural gas in 2009.
October 13, the Security Service of Ukraine instituted another criminal case wherein Timoshenko is charged with an attempt at a gross embezzlement of budget money by relegating the liabilities of a private corporation totalling $ 405.5 million to the government.
The country’s electric power monopoly, the United Energy Systems of Ukraine, of which Timoshenko was President – and de facto owner – at the time, owed the money to the Russian Defence Ministry. Timoshenko is accused of committing the attempt in complicity with the then Prime Minister, Pavel Lazarenko.
Department of Investigations at the State Tax Service also issued charges to her to the tune of $ 165 million November 10. She is charged with concealing the earnings in foreign currency, embezzling the budgetary money, evading taxes in the amount of $ 6 million through a jobbing with payments for material valuables, and concealing revenues in offshore companies.
Timoshenko said earlier she would not petition to Ukrainian courts anymore against the decisions of other courts regarding her fate, as she said the powers of the Ukrainian judiciary are constricted by the incumbent authorities. Her lawyers said in this connection they plan to seek the overruling of the Ukrainian court verdict at the international judiciary agencies. However, lawyers Valentina Telichenko who represents Timoshenko at the European court for human rights, has admitted a possibility of filing a cassation over the ruling of the Appeals Court all the same.