VIENNA
— In a defeat for the United States, an Austrian judge refused Thursday to
order the extradition of Dmitri V. Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire and onetime
patron of the country’s ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, siding with defense lawyers who said the American request was
politically motivated.
Mr.
Firtash, who made his fortune in Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt natural gas industry,
has been charged by federal prosecutors in Chicago with racketeering and other
crimes. He and his associates are accused of having paid $18.5 million in
bribes to officials in India to secure a titanium-mining deal that never
materialized.
The ruling, by Judge Christoph Bauer of
the Landesgerichtsstrasse Regional Court in Vienna, amounted to a scathing
rebuke of the Justice and State Departments, and reflected the diminished
credibility of the United States authorities, even in the eyes of a European
ally.
Judge Bauer said that
he did not doubt the veracity of two witnesses cited by American prosecutors in
their filings, “but whether these witnesses even existed,” because the Justice
Department repeatedly refused to provide requested information or respond to
questions.
At a hearing that stretched late into
the evening, Mr. Firtash’s defense team sought to demolish the American case
and discredit the Justice Department’s extradition request.
The main thrust of the team’s arguments,
and the issue that clearly dominated the attention of Judge Bauer, was that the
case was directed by the State Department in pursuit of larger American foreign
policy goals.
In oral arguments, and in testimony by a
parade of high-profile witnesses, the lawyers described the American
prosecution as an effort to punish Mr. Firtash for his ties to Mr. Yanukovych
and his support of Russia, and to sideline him from future political activity
in Ukraine.
In perhaps their most electrifying
argument, Mr. Firtash’s lawyers asserted that an initial request by the United
States for his arrest, on Oct. 30, 2013, was directly tied to a trip to Ukraine
by an assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, in which she sought to
prevent Mr. Yanukovych from backing out of a promise to sign sweeping political
and trade agreements with Europe.
Ms. Nuland left Washington on the day
the arrest request was submitted to Austria. The request was rescinded four
days later, said a lawyer, Christian Hausmaninger, after Ms. Nuland came to
believe she had received assurances from Mr. Yanukovych that he would sign the
accords.
From that point, nothing happened in the
Indian bribery case, Mr. Hausmaninger said, until Feb. 26 — four days after Mr.
Yanukovych was ousted after months of street protests.
The arrest request was renewed then, and
the Austrian authorities detained Mr. Firtash two weeks later, the same day the
new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, was visiting President
Obama at the White House.
The Justice Department has denied any
political motivation in the case.
In a statement issued by the State and
Justice Departments, the government said it was “disappointed” by the ruling
and hoped for an appeal.
While
the timing of the arrest request and the meetings in Ukraine could have been
coincidental, the lawyers’ narrative was compelling enough that Judge Bauer
returned to it again and again, with repeated questions about what happened in
the Ukrainian presidential administration in early November 2013.
The judge persisted in
that line of questioning as one witness after another testified, including the
first president of Ukraine, Leonid M. Kravchuk; Mr. Yanukovych’s longtime chief
of staff, Sergei Lyovochkin; and a former energy minister, Yuriy Boyko.
Judge Bauer also seemed particularly
interested in a meeting that Mr. Firtash brokered at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in
Vienna — in March 2014, even after he had been arrested and released on bail —
between another Ukrainian billionaire, Petro O. Poroshenko, and the ex-boxing
champion Vitali Klitschko, who were then each vying for the presidency.
After the Vienna meeting, Mr. Klitschko
bowed out of the presidential race and instead ran for mayor of Kiev, the
capital. Mr. Poroshenko is now president.
In the end, even Patrizia Frank, the
lone prosecutor representing the Austrian government and, by extension, the
United States, acknowledged that not enough had been done to prove that
extradition was justified and that the Americans had met the requirements of a
bilateral treaty.
In a brief
presentation, Ms. Frank said the Austrians had recently received a new
statement from an F.B.I. agent that might help clarify things, but that it
still needed to be evaluated.
The defense team said that no further
time was needed and urged a ruling.
Judge Bauer said he had concluded that
the American authorities had been after Mr. Firtash since at least 2006 and he
noted that a finding of political motivation was sufficient to reject
extradition even if a crime had occurred.
“America obviously saw Firtash as
somebody who was threatening their economic interests,” Judge Bauer said,
explaining his decision from the bench. But he also said the United States had
not provided coherent evidence of a crime either: “There just wasn’t sufficient
proof.”
The rejection of the extradition request
does not end Mr. Firtash’s legal problems. The Austrian government could
appeal. Even if it does not, it is unclear that Mr. Firtash could return to
Ukraine without risking arrest. Mr. Poroshenko’s administration has recently
declared an all-out war on oligarchs, seeking to curtail their power and
influence, and some officials have leveled specific charges of wrongdoing by
subsidiaries of Mr. Firtash’s conglomerate, DF Group.
The Justice Department’s indictment
still stands, and Mr. Firtash could be arrested in other countries that have
extradition treaties with the United States, as he would remain a wanted man as
far as the Justice Department is concerned.
Mr. Firtash, who made a fortune as a
middleman between Gazprom,
the Russian energy giant, and the Ukrainian natural gas company
Naftogaz, has long been viewed as close to the Kremlin and has been under
scrutiny by the United States since at least 2005.
Taking the witness stand Thursday, Mr.
Firtash called the bribery allegations “absolutely untrue.”
Smiling contentedly after the ruling,
Mr. Firtash said: “I am not an enemy of America. I am afraid America has
another problem, which is there are certain people who are pursuing their own
personal interests, and by pursuing those personal interests tried to make me
into an enemy of America.”
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