New York company paid $ 11 million to resolve the conflict in Ukraine

Ex-Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko accused the New York company of lobbying the interests of ex-president Viktor Yanukovych and promoting its political persecution. To resolve the conflict, the American company paid $ 11 million. This is reported by the newspaper. The New York Times.

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“Dirty contract”

New York-based law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom paid $ 11 million to avoid a lawsuit filed by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The politician accused the company of complicity in its political persecution.

It is reported that the company acted in the interests of Viktor Yanukovych, who at that time was the president of Ukraine. In particular, she created a report that was used to justify the ex-president’s actions related to Tymoshenko’s imprisonment. Since 2011, the politician has been in prison for abuse of power, which the international community has widely condemned as politically motivated.

After Yanukovych stepped down from power in 2014 amid street protests against corruption in the country and Ukraine’s movement toward Moscow, Tymoshenko was released. She began to plan retaliation against Yanukovych and those who, in her opinion, allowed her to be jailed, including Skadden.

In an interview with The New York Times in Washington in December 2018, Tymoshenko recalled that it was “very painful” to learn about Skadden’s work, “when I was in prison and watched it from a solitary confinement.”

She also accused Skadden’s lawyers of “bleaching Yanukovych and his government” in exchange for money, and added: “It’s a pity that such a well-known company as Skadden even considered taking the case on themselves. This is a dirty, dirty, dirty contract. ”

After the interview, she and her lawyer Sergei Vlasenko, who also argued that the Yanukovych government treated him unfairly, turned to the law firm Reid Collins & Tsai. They tasked the latter with investigating the possibility of filing a lawsuit against Skadden for her actions.

Conflict Resolution

Skadden paid more than $ 11 million to settle the case even before the lawsuit was filed, according to people familiar with the settlement. Apparently, the funds from the settlement were transferred to Tymoshenko and Vlasenko through Reed Collins.

This agreement is reflected in the documents submitted by Tymoshenko and Vlasenko to the Ukrainian government, which confirm: each of them received about 5,5 million dollars. However, the records do not mention Skadden.

In his materials, Vlasenko described money as “foreign income”. Tymoshenko in her statement called this amount “compensation for the damage caused by the political repressions of 2011-2014, which was received in the United States at the pre-trial settlement stage”.

Payments came after Skadden last year paid $ 4,6 million to settle an investigation by the Department of Justice on whether his work for the Yanukovych’s government violates foreign lobbying laws.

The firm subsequently revealed in filings with the Justice Department that it was paid a total of more than $5,2 million for its work: $4,15 million came from the Ukrainian oligarch and his American lobbyist, and $1,1 million from from the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. According to the newspaper, in 2017 Skadden returned $567 thousand to the Ukrainian government.

By the way, one of the lawyers who helped in the preparation of the report, Alex van der Zvaan admitted that he lied to federal investigators that year about his reports regarding the company's work for the Yanukovych government.

Skadden lead lawyer Gregory B. Craig, a former adviser to President Barack Obama at the White House, was acquitted last year on a felony charge. He was accused of lying to the federal authorities about work. And Paul Manafort, who served as political adviser to Yanukovych, is serving 7,5 years in prison for financial and lobbying violations related to his work for Yanukovych.

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