Lazarenko, Pavlo
Lazarenko, Pavlo (Лазаренко, Павло), b 23 January 1953 in Karpivka, Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Politician, parliamentarian, and sixth prime minister of independent Ukraine; fugitive from justice; convicted money-launderer. Having graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Agricultural Institute as an agronomist in 1978, he also obtained candidate’s (1994) and doctoral (1997) degrees. Beginning as an agricultural administrator in 1978, he moved into full-time work in the Communist Party of Ukraine apparatus, advancing from raion committee second secretary in August 1985 to council head of the agro-industrial complex and simultaneously deputy head of the executive committee of Dnipropetrovsk oblast soviet.
Elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1990 from a Dnipropetrovsk constituency and a member of the parliamentary committee for the agro-industrial complex, he resigned as deputy when appointed presidential representative in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. After serving in that capacity from March 1992 until June 1994, Lazarenko was re-elected to the Supreme Council of Ukraine in July 1994, where he joined the Yednist (Unity) caucus. He became head of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast council through election on 26 June 1994, and, from July to September 1995, was appointed head (governor) of the oblast state administration. On 5 September 1995, he was appointed first vice-prime minister of Ukraine.
On 28 May 1996 he was promoted to prime minister, replacing Yevhen Marchuk. Lazarenko used his position to provide rent-seeking opportunities through government contracts for his friends in return for a percentage of the proceeds. In this manner he embezzled $200 million from the Ukrainian state, which was overlooked so long as he remained loyal to President Leonid Kuchma. His association with and patronage of Yuliia Tymoshenko, businesswoman and politician as well as chair of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, dated from this time. Corruption, business, and organized crime were interconnected with normal politics of that day. On 16 July 1996, Lazarenko escaped an attempt on his life when a bomb exploded beside his car on the highway. The incident was linked to his political rival, Volodymyr Shcherban.
As prime minister, Lazarenko was blamed for foreign investors’ loss of confidence in Ukraine. He had attempted but failed to reform the tax system. While on an official visit to Canada on 19 June 1997, Lazarenko was abruptly dismissed by President Leonid Kuchma. Ostensibly, the dismissal was prompted by his lack of action on anticorruption measures, plus suspicion of involvement in corruption and money-laundering, which resulted in a call for his removal by the pro-presidential People’s Democratic party (NDP). In fact, as with Yevhen Marchuk, presidential ambitions were his undoing; Kuchma pressed charges only when Lazarenko demonstrated disloyalty by beginning to organize a campaign for the highest office. He was replaced as prime minister on 16 July by Valerii Pustovoitenko. His ouster was seen as a collapse or at least eclipse of the Dnipropetrovsk clan’s dominance in Ukrainian politics.
Lazarenko then returned to his position as Dnipropetrovsk oblast council chairman and deputy in the Supreme Council of Ukraine. In September 1997, he joined and became leader of the Hromada All-Ukrainian Association, which gave him a base for opposition to the Leonid Kuchma–Valerii Pustovoitenko administration. In the Supreme Council, the Yednist caucus, also under his leadership, grew by attracting adherents of Yevhen Marchuk’s Social-Market Choice fraction. Hromada was the first party to register for the 1998 elections. Although Lazarenko’s name was first on its list, he was elected instead from a single-member district in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. In the Sepreme Council he led the 45-member Hromada caucus and was a member of the parliamentary committee on local government.
In January 1999, his Hromada All-Ukrainian Association chose Lazarenko as its candidate for the presidency in the elections scheduled for later that year, but this did not come to pass. The previous month, Lazarenko had been arrested while attempting to enter Switzerland on a Panamanian passport and charged with money laundering. In February, having raised $2.6 million bail, he skipped bail and returned to Ukraine to plead his innocence. On 17 February 1999, however, the Supreme Council of Ukraine voted to lift his immunity and allow his arrest and trial. A case had been building against him for two years. But on 16 February he turned up in Greece claiming a sudden illness. He was then arrested entering the United States of America on a diplomatic passport. Facing charges of embezzlement and money laundering by Ukrainian, Swiss, and American law enforcement agencies, he remained in detention. He continued to fight his extradition, proclaiming his innocence, applied for political asylum, but was rejected. Lazarenko purchased a mansion in California for his family, and sent a letter to the Supreme Council of Ukraine asking it to reconsider sanctioning his arrest. In June 2000, he was charged in Ukraine with arranging the contract killings of several people, including the parliamentarian Yevhen Shcherban, and indicted in the United States on charges of laundering $114 million while in office. After pleading guilty the same month to laundering $9 million through Switzerland, he was given an 18-month suspended sentence. According to prosecutors this represented a mere fraction of the $170 million that had passed through Switzerland, and a mere one per cent of the total of $880 million embezzled. In spite of his conciliatory gesture to the Swiss, a US judge subsequently denied bail to Lazarenko. President Leonid Kuchma’s call for his extradition was to no avail in the absence of an extradition treaty. Besides, as the Ukrainian prosecutor-general pointed out, a trial would expose Kuchma’s complicity in Lazarenko’s corruption and money-laundering. The case illustrated the extent and pervasiveness of political corruption in Ukraine at that time as well as the powerlessness of its government to deal with it.
In July 2001, a wire fraud charge was added to the 53-count indictment against Lazarenko in California. The following month the case against him in Ukraine for embezzlement and bribery was said to be ready: it was alleged that he had accepted $120 million in bribes and had embezzled a further $20 million. On 7 February 2002, the Supreme Council of Ukraine deprived Lazarenko of his deputy’s status, and he was charged with commissioning two murders. In June 2003, when Lazarenko was released on bail of $86 million, the Ukrainian prosecutor-general announced that Ukraine wanted to try Lazarenko when the United States was through with him. He went on trial in California in March 2004, insisting that the money he was accused of stealing was actually earned legally, and that his business dealings were normal in Ukraine. On 7 May 2004, 23 of 53 counts against Lazarenko were dismissed, including those which implicated Unified Energy Systems, the company of his former associate, Yuliia Tymoshenko. After five days’ deliberation, the jury found him guilty on all remaining counts; Lazarenko appealed the conviction and several charges were later dropped. He was sent to prison in 2009.
Released from prison in 2012, Lazarenko was sent back to jail (temporarily) on account of his uncertain legal status in the United States—lacking a valid visa or refugee status. Implicated along with Yuliia Tymoshenko in the 1996 murder of Yevhen Shcherban, Lazarenko denied any involvement calling the trial in progress in Ukraine in 2013 politically motivated. The US government sold Lazarenko’s California mansion for $5 million in 2014 for which he had paid $6.75 million in 1998. He continued to fight for restoration of his stolen $250 million in various offshore accounts and to be granted political asylum. Lazarenko’s name appeared alongside Petro Poroshenko’s in the Panama Papers showing how he had handled his offshore trading and accounts.
A court in the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda in 2016 confiscated some $67 million of Lazarenko’s money as proceeds of money laundering and turned it over to the state budget. Curiously, the Ukrainian government made no claim on these funds. Another $30 million was discovered frozen in a Lithuanian bank which the Ukrainian prosecutor-general was interested in having returned. US authorities have promised to return the bulk of Lazarenko’s funds to Ukraine when finally unfrozen. But the American government and the former premier were still working on a settlement in the form of an indefinite postponement between them at the time of this writing. In 2020, Lazarenko achieved the distinction of being the only Ukrainian in a listing of the ‘Top 10 Most Corrupt Politicians in the World.’
After Lazarenko’s departure from Ukraine, his erstwhile ally, Yuliia Tymoshenko, created a new political party, Batkivshchyna party, carved out of the core of his Hromada All-Ukrainian Association. Unlike its parent, Tymoshenko’s party adopted a pro-presidential stance and in 2002 won 7.3 per cent of the vote. The Hromada All-Ukrainian Association, having secured 4.7 per cent of the vote in 1998, ceased to participate in elections beginning in 2002 and disappeared from the political scene.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leshchenko, S. Amerikanska saha Pavla Lazarenka (Lviv 2013)
Bohdan Harasymiw
[This article was written in 2023.]