Lutsenko is getting rich with thoughts about how he will share Lazarenko’s millions with the Americans
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko must give an answer in October about his conditions for concluding a deal with the investigation, which will allow the division of $220 million that is under arrest in the United States, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko announced this.
“Citizen Lazarenko must give an answer to the American authorities by the second half of October about his readiness to conclude a deal with the investigation,” he said in an interview with Ukrinform.
The Prosecutor General noted that one of the conditions that Lazarenko put forward for concluding a deal with the investigation was the closure of economic criminal cases against him in Ukraine.
“Lazarenko’s lawyers were in the Prosecutor General’s Office. They were interested in the prospects for economic affairs here. Their perspective is obvious. The statute of limitations has long passed, and, as far as I understand, this is one of Lazarenko’s conditions for concluding agreements with the US authorities on the distribution of funds that are likely to be confiscated,” Lutsenko noted.
He said that the Ukrainian side announced its claims for reimbursement of the amount, which during the investigation was proven to be of origin from Ukraine.
“As soon as Lazarenko says yes, Ukraine and America will meet and make a decision on agreeing on the distribution. After this, we will have to sign some documents with which we will lift the Ukrainian arrests. Currently, American and Ukrainian assets are being seized,” explained the Prosecutor General.
He clarified that about $220 million is currently under arrest. After Lazarenko concludes an agreement with the investigation, part of this amount should go to the United States to pay for technical expenses, as well as payments to experts and judges. Part of the funds will go to Ukraine, and another part to the other five countries whose banks contain Lazarenko’s frozen funds.
“This is quite a difficult job, but we have completed 75 percent of it,” summed up Lutsenko.
Pavel Lazarenko headed the government of Ukraine from June 1996 to July 1997. In 1998, he became a people's deputy and headed the Hromada parliamentary faction. Lazarenko was arrested in the United States in February 1999 with a Panamanian passport. He spent about four years in prison awaiting trial. In June 2003, he was released on bail of $65 million, but on October 1, 2008, the ex-prime minister decided to return to an American prison, saying that he feared for his life.
The prosecutor's office accused Lazarenko of extortion, fraud, transportation of stolen funds and laundering almost $1994 million in 1999-280. Lazarenko also appears in materials published in the spring of 2016 about the owners of large offshore companies, which are based on data from the Panama Archives - a collection of documents about offshore schemes of a little-known company from Panama, Mossack Fonseca.
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