Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s defense team says the repeated postponement of hearings in the fabricated case involving United Energy Systems of Ukraine is a deliberate delay of the trial, according to Official web site of Yulia Tymoshenko.
"Everything happening today, the postponement of the hearings, shows that the prosecution and government want the trial to never take place because the case was clearly fabricated and there is no evidence that Yulia Tymoshenko is guilty of something, especially since there is already a ruling by the Supreme Court in this case," said defender Andriy Kozhemyakin.
In his turn, Serhiy Vlasenko recalled that the report "Separation of Political and Criminal Responsibility" adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) recognizes the cases against Yulia Tymoshenko and former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko as not just selective justice, but no justice at all.
He noted that the report states that when the "Ukrainian authorities began to realize that the original charge – the ‘gas case’ – may turn out to be untenable in the international arena, new cases were launched against Yulia Tymoshenko and old cases reopened."
"The charges relate to value added tax fraud allegedly committed by UESU between 1997 and 1999. At that time, Ms Tymoshenko no longer worked for this company. This fact is not even disputed by the prosecution, which is reduced to alleging that Ms Tymoshenko had given 'oral instructions' to UESU’s accountants pushing them to commit such a fraud – but without offering any evidence for this assertion. Lack of evidence was in fact cited as the reason for the closure of the same investigation in 2005, which was at the time confirmed by the Ukrainian Supreme Court after a several years of litigation in the lower courts. The reopening of this case after another eight years, without there being any new facts, in the well-known political context, smacks of abuse," the report goes on to say.
"This is the international opinion of what is happening in Kharkiv," Serhiy Vlasenko underscored.
Today the Kyivsky District Court of Kharkiv adjourned the trial in the UESU case until 3 pm on August 16, having refused to consider the defense motion to close the case.
