Judge Rebuffs U.S. in Rejecting Extradition of Ukraine Billionaire

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 The request was rescinded four days later, said a lawyer, Christian Hausmaninger, after Ms.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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