A federal judge in San Francisco sentenced Pavlo Lazarenko, a former prime minister of Ukraine accused of stealing $114 million while in office from 1996 to 1997, to nine years in an American prison for money laundering, wire fraud and transporting stolen goods, according to The New York Times. He was also fined $10 million.
He fled to the United States in 1999, seeking asylum, but instead was arrested and charged with siphoning tens of millions of dollars of public money into his personal accounts and attempting to hide some $21 million in American banks, mostly in San Francisco. Mr. Lazarenko, 53, who was convicted in 2004 and has since been under house arrest, is the first former head of government tried in the United States since the Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, who was convicted of money laundering and drug trafficking by a federal jury in Miami in 1992 and sentenced to 40 years.
