Former Premier of Ukraine Pavlo Lazarenko told the San Francisco District Court last Wednesday that he does not intend to plead either guilty or innocent. The text of this statement was submitted by Maryna Dovhopola, Mr. Lazarenko’s family lawyer in Ukraine.
Explaining the reasons for this refusal, Mr. Lazarenko says in his statement, “The indictment is nothing but political persecution and character assassination of me as the Hromada Party leader by Kuchma’s dictatorial regime in collusion with some high Washington White House officials.”
The former head of government continues to maintain that he is “a political prisoner” and that the San Francisco court “has no jurisdiction in terms of either territory or the nature of the charges leveled.”
Simultaneously, Mykola Obykhod, Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, claims that US justice is authorized to investigate crimes committed by Mr. Lazarenko on the US territory, Interfax-Ukraine reports. He noted, among other things, that when Mr. Lazarenko challenges the territorial jurisdiction of the US court, he “probably means that his main crimes were committed in Ukraine.”
Answering the agency’s question about which year the unlawful activities mentioned in the Ukrainian indictment of Lazarenko were allegedly committed in, Mr. Obykhod said, “The indictment includes the temporal periods of money flows in which Pavlo Lazarenko has been implicated... This money still exists and is flowing today, so the indictment can eventually embrace even the years 2000 and 2001.”
