Shcherban, Volodymyr

Shcherban, Volodymyr [Щербань, Володимир; Ščerban'] b 26 January 1950 in Artemivsk (Luhansk oblast). Politician; leader of the Liberal Party of Ukraine (LPU); and oblast governor. An economist, he received his initial training at the Donetsk Institute of Soviet Commerce, and was thereafter employed in the retail sector (becoming manager of a state-run department store chain). He completed a candidate’s degree at Donetsk University in 1997, his dissertation being on the establishment of a market-type economic system in Ukraine. He is also holder of a doctoral degree awarded by the Sumy Agrarian University in 2006.

In 1990 he was elected to the Donetsk city council and became deputy head of the council in 1992. In April 1994, he was elected to the Supreme Council of Ukraine from a constituency in Donetsk oblast and joined the LPU’s ‘Social-Market Choice’ (SRV) caucus formed in June 1995, of which he was leader until October 1996. Leadership of the caucus was then taken over by Yevhen Marchuk. Owing to difficulties working as a team player, Shcherban became the sole LPU member in the SRV caucus by 1997. Simultaneously, he was head of the Donetsk oblast council (July 1994–October 1996) and head of the oblast’s state administration or governor (July 1995 to July 1996). He was forced out of his position as governor in the wake of the attempt on the life of Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, in which he was apparently implicated, and which was seen as a manifestation of the Dnipropetrovsk-Donetsk political clan rivalry. He was formerly a member of the commission established to develop industrial policy for 1996–2000 and of the presidential commission on maritime matters.

In the 1998 elections to the Supreme Council of Ukraine the LPU and Labor Party formed an electoral bloc with Shcherban’s name at the head of the list. It failed, however, to cross the four percent threshold, but Shcherban was elected from a single-member district in Donetsk oblast. He joined the ‘Independents’ caucus serving as its spokesman (July 1998–September 1999), and became a member of the economic policy committee as well as head (July 1998–September 1999) of one of its sub-committees. He resigned his parliamentary seat in 1999, and was appointed governor of Sumy oblast.

Re-elected to the Supreme Council of Ukraine in 2002 as part of Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine list, he drifted briefly into the Yedyna Ukraina (One Ukraine) fraction before joining the Social Choice caucus. He was a member of the finance and banking committee. Shcherban again resigned his seat on 19 June 2003 on being reappointed governor of Sumy oblast.

In the wake of the Orange Revolution, Shcherban fled to the United States of America in 2005 to evade charges of election fraud, extortion, tax evasion, and abuse of office. He was unsuccessful in applying for asylum, was imprisoned over an expired visa, and extradited in 2006 to Ukraine. He evaded arrest through the intervention of parliamentary colleagues and in 2007 was cleared of criminal liability by Ukraine’s prosecutor general. His net worth in 2023 was said to be $5 million US.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kuzio, Taras. ‘Crime, Politics and Business in 1990s Ukraine,’ Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 47, no. 2 (June 2014)

Bohdan Harasymiw

[This article was written in 2024.]