The husband of jailed Ukrainian ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Olexander Tymoshenko, is seeking political asylum in the Czech Republic, Czech daily Pravo reported on its website on Friday.
The report said it was “highly likely” that Tymoshenko’s request would be satisfied. In January 2011, former Ukrainian Energy Minister Bogdan Danilishin was also granted political asylum in the Czech Republic.
Tymoshenko, 51, was jailed in October 2011 for seven years on charges of abusing her office in the signing of a gas deal with Russia in 2009. The verdict was internationally condemned as politically motivated. The ex-premier said she is a victim of a conspiracy by Yanukovych, her long-time political opponent. The Ukrainian authorities denied the allegations.
Olexander Tymoshenko had kept a low profile for the past decade until last summer, when his wife’s trial began in Kiev.
In the early 2000s, he was charged with corruption and embezzlement of state money while heading the Ukrainian United Energy Systems corporation in 1990s, and spent a year in prison. His spouse was also charged and jailed for a few weeks, but the case was later declared illegal and closed.
It was reopened last year in what the Ukrainian opposition and many international observers view as part of a government crackdown on Tymoshenko.
The former premier, who has been charged with causing $187 million in damage to Ukraine’s economy by pushing through the gas deal with Russia, is serving her sentence in a penal colony in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov.
