The High Anti-Corruption Court has set bail at 33 million hryvnias ($762,000) for Yulia Tymoshenko in a case over the alleged bribery of lawmakers, RBC-Ukraine reported.
According to the outlet, prosecutors had requested bail of 50 million hryvnias ($1,154 million).
Tymoshenko was also barred from leaving the Kyiv region without the investigator’s permission and ordered to surrender her international passport. The court further prohibited her from communicating with several Verkhovna Rada deputies.
Earlier, Tymoshenko wrote on Facebook that her accounts had been frozen pending the court’s decision, preventing her from posting bail: “What is surreal? It’s when you plan to post bail in an obviously orchestrated political case with money received as compensation for political persecution by a not-so-bright ‘dictator.’ But you can’t do it because your accounts were frozen even before the court’s decision,” she wrote.
In the night of January 14, representatives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) searched the offices of Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party. Anti-corruption authorities later released a wiretap of a meeting between Tymoshenko and an unnamed Verkhovna Rada deputy. The published audio appeared to discuss a scheme to buy lawmakers’ votes.
At the January 16 hearing, Tymoshenko said the other voice on the recordings belonged to Ihor Kopytin, a lawmaker from the Servant of the People party. She accused him of working with NABU to compromise her: “Mr. Kopytin is not just a deputy; there’s a criminal case against him at NABU. He is under pressure from NABU to essentially carry out certain instructions. You know there are certain understandings when they say: ‘Dig up something somewhere, and we’ll drop your criminal cases in return,’” she said.
Before the hearing, she also insisted the released recordings were fabricated and that such a conversation “never happened” in her life. Tymoshenko denies all accusations.
