ANALYSIS: Scherban back home in Ukraine - a hot potato for politicians (11/26/06)

ANALYSIS

Scherban back home in Ukraine - a hot potato for politicians

by Oleg Varfolomeyev
Eurasia Daily Monitor

Former Sumy Oblast Administration Chairmn Volodymyr Scherban has returned to Ukraine from self-imposed exile in the United States. In Ukraine, he is suspected of several crimes, and for those who helped Viktor Yushchenko come to power in 2004, Mr. Scherban epitomizes the corrupt regime of former President Leonid Kuchma.

For many years Mr. Scherban was a member of Mr. Kuchma's entourage. Ukraine, however, has changed since early 2005, when Mr. Scherban left Ukraine, and now he hopes he will not be punished. His tarnished reputation, however, may prompt his former allies to shun him, and his return to politics remains highly questionable.

Mr. Scherban was governor (the widely used title for chair of the oblast administration) of Sumy in 1999-2005, with a short break in 2002. He fled to the United States in April 2005 "so as not to be lynched" by Orange Revolution activists in Kyiv, as he recently explained. Shortly after his departure, Ukrainian prosecutors accused him of election fraud, extortion, tax evasion and abuse of office.

In July 2005 he unsuccessfully applied for asylum in the United States, and in October 2005 he was imprisoned in Florida after his visa expired. He was later released on bail, only to be arrested again in May of this year. In early 2006, Kyiv asked Washington to extradite him.

Mr. Scherban returned to Ukraine on November 4, and Kyiv police escorted him to the Procurator General's Office. The prosecutors, however, released him almost immediately, as three national deputies from the Party of the Regions (PRU) of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych vouched for him. Since then, Mr. Scherban has given numerous interviews to journalists, denying the accusations against him and claiming to be a victim of political persecution. Despite Mr. Scherban's release, however, no case against him has been closed, and the investigation is continuing.

President Yushchenko expressed his disagreement with Mr. Scherban's release, saying that the deputies' vouching for him was "a dubious gesture." He warned them of possible negative consequences to their reputation. Mr. Scherban said that he returned to Ukraine voluntarily, but Mr. Yushchenko maintained that Mr. Scherban's case was "the expulsion of an individual suspected of serious criminal offenses," and expressed his gratitude to the U.S. government for sending him back home.

Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Lutsenko expressed his dismay over the prosecutors' decision, speaking after a meeting with Interpol director Ronald Noble in Kyiv on November 7. He complained that police had encountered difficulties detaining Mr. Scherban at the airport, as other law-enforcement agencies, which Mr. Lutsenko did not name, "interfered."

Apparently there is not much that Mr. Lutsenko can do, as he has no authority over the prosecution, and, moreover, the chair under him is shaky. On November 2 the PRU-dominated Verkhovna Rada passed a motion asking Prime Minister Yanukovych to suspend Mr. Lutsenko over allegations of official abuse at his ministry. Mr. Lutsenko doubted the legality of the move, and both Messrs. Yushchenko and Yanukovych came to his defense, saying that he will carry on as minister. Mr. Yanukovych, however, made it clear that he may change his mind. Speaking on TV on November 3, Mr. Lutsenko linked the threat to suspend him to Mr. Scherban's upcoming return.

Mr. Scherban is apparently confident of his future. Speaking on his arrival, he announced that he would like to return to politics and said he hopes for protection by well-positioned "friends" who, he noted, are not only members of the PRU, but also of Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party and the opposition Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc. Among such friends, he named Mr. Yanukovych, National Security and Defense Council Secretary Vitalii Haiduk, Mr. Haiduk's business partner and board chairman of the Industrial Union of Donbas (IUD) Serhii Taruta, and National Deputy Rynat Akhmetov, reportedly Ukraine's richest tycoon.

In an interview with Ukrayinska Pravda, Mr. Scherban told amusing anecdotes about several of these friends, including Messrs. Akhmetov and Haiduk with whom, according to Mr. Scherban, he founded the IUD in 1995. He hinted that he might tell more about people in top positions. Many of them hail from Donetsk, and Mr. Scherban, who was Donetsk governor in the mid-1990s, was the cradle of "the Donetsk clan," now Ukraine's most influential regional group.

Association with the disgraced Mr. Scherban may taint the PRU's image, Segodnya quoted analyst Mykhailo Pohrebynsky as saying. Mr. Pohrebynsky should know, as he helped the PRU in previous election campaigns. Mr. Scherban is a political hot potato now. Those who helped Mr. Yushchenko come to power using the famous slogan "Bandits to Prison," like Mr. Lutsenko, cannot do much about Mr. Scherban, as their hands are tied. And the heavyweights like Mr. Haiduk and Mr. Yanukovych are unlikely to be happy to hear Mr. Scherban calling them his friends.

Speaking at a press conference on November 8, Prime Minister Yanukovych reluctantly admitted that he used to be on friendly terms with Mr. Scherban, but tried to distance himself from him. "I just don't remember," he said, when asked by a journalist whether he once presented Mr. Scherban with the gun that police found at Mr. Scherban's home in 2005.

Sources: 1+1 TV, ICTV, November 3; Interfax-Ukraine, November 4; Channel 5, November 4, 7; Ukrayinska Pravda, November 7; UNIAN, November 8; Segodnya, November 9.

The article above is reprinted from Eurasia Daily Monitor with permission from its publisher, the Jamestown Foundation, www.jamestown.org.

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