Lazarenko denied bail (12/20/98)

Lazarenko denied bail

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukrainian National Deputy Pavlo Lazarenko, arrested at the Swiss border and detained on charges of money laundering, was denied bail at a December 14 court hearing in Geneva and will most likely spend at least another month in jail.

The Judicial Chamber of Geneva, where Mr. Lazarenko is being held, ruled that it cannot accept the bail money offered by the Ukrainian Parliament member because he did not prove that the bail money was separate from the funds that have been frozen in his Swiss bank accounts while he is being investigated on charges of money laundering. Through his attorney, Mr. Lazarenko had stated that he was ready to pay $3.5 million for his release on bail.

The court decision was made three days after the Judicial Chamber of Geneva prolonged the term of Mr. Lazarenko's preliminary detention for one month.

On December 15 the Swiss Embassy in Kyiv issued a statement to explain the decision to keep Mr. Lazarenko locked up: "The decision of the [Judicial] Chamber was motivated by the existing possibility of escape by Mr. Lazarenko, and also because his presence is mandatory for the continuing investigation." Under Swiss law a person must be charged with a crime or released within three days of his arrest.

Initially, Mr. Lazarenko's detention had been extended for four days while the investigating judge, Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, traveled to Kyiv to complete his investigation into the case.

The Swiss Embassy statement also finally clarified the circumstances involved in Mr. Lazarenko's arrest last week as he tried to enter Switzerland from France at the border town of Basel. Members of the Hromada Party, which Mr. Lazarenko leads, had contested many of the unofficial details of the arrest that appeared in local Ukrainian and Swiss newspapers.

The Embassy statement verified that Mr. Lazarenko did indeed produce a Panamanian passport at the border, in which there was no permit to enter the Switzerland. It said that in September Mr. Lazarenko had been denied a visa because he was under criminal investigation in Ukraine.

The Swiss Embassy press release also noted that Ukraine has not begun any extradition proceedings so that Mr. Lazarenko could be tried in Ukraine.

Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stated more than once that it is limited in what it can do to help Mr. Lazarenko because he has continually rejected any meetings with Ukrainian Embassy officials in Switzerland.

President Leonid Kuchma said on December 15 that Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry "has repeatedly raised the question of granting legal aid to Lazarenko."

Meanwhile, the Procurator General's Office in Ukraine issued a statement the same day to reject allegations by the Hromada Party that Mr. Lazarenko had been arrested by Swiss authorities at the request of the Ukrainian government. "In order to do this, it would be necessary to strip him of his diplomatic immunity, which is the prerogative of the Verkhovna Rada," it stated.

However, Procurator General Mykola Azarov added at a December 14 press briefing that the procuracy's own investigations into Mr. Lazarenko's financial wheelings and dealings are continuing and that the case is "being investigated successfully."

Swiss banking authorities froze several bank accounts allegedly belonging to Mr. Lazarenko in March 1998 after they received some 20 requests from the Ukrainian government to investigate Mr. Lazarenko's financial situation there. Some of those documents are now in the hands of Ukrainian criminal authorities, who have said they are ready to prosecute Mr. Lazarenko just as soon as Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada votes to lift the immunity from criminal prosecution that is carried by members of Parliament.

Hromada Party members and supporters of Mr. Lazarenko have been picketing both the Verkhovna Rada and the Swiss Embassy almost daily since Mr. Lazarenko's arrest. They are charging that Mr. Lazarenko is the victim of a political conspiracy by the Kuchma administration aimed at discrediting the former prime minister and neutralizing his political power in the run-up to the presidential elections scheduled for October 1999.

"We are not interested in knowing why Pavlo Lazarenko was detained," said Liudmyla Matiiko, vice-chairperson of the Hromada Party, at a rally before the Swiss Embassy on December 10. "We demand that he be returned because his human rights have been violated."

President Kuchma has had a running verbal war with Mr. Lazarenko, a one-time political ally, since he fired Mr. Lazarenko from the post of prime minister in the summer of 1997 for being lax on fighting corruption and for stalling on economic reforms.

In the last year the president's administration shut down two national newspapers that were aligned with Mr. Lazarenko, Pravda Ukrainy and Vseukrainskie Viedomosti. The former was banned in January for having improperly registered with the Ministry of Information, while the latter went out of business in March, after it was sued for printing incorrectly that Andrii Shevchenko of Dynamo Kyiv would sign with AC Milan of the Italian soccer league. The Dynamo Sports Club was awarded approximately $1.8 million by the Ukrainian Arbitration Court.

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