Press secretary of Oleksandr Yanukovych Yuriy Kirasir commented on the appeal of the Yanukovych family to lift sanctions being denied by the EU General Court, as he wrote on Facebook.
Kirasir believes the EU General Court was trapped by the decision they made back in 2014, when they first imposed sanctions against the Yanukovych family. He says that then it was done in favour of the political powers in office, and now they are unwilling to admit their mistake.
He says that the Court refused the appeal, as the “claimants didn’t present any evidence that could bring doubt as to the validity of the accusations drawn against them in Ukraine”. He speculates, however, that Ukraine didn’t give any evidence to the Court, apart from the letter from the Prosecutor’s General office on starting a criminal case against Yanukovych, which, according to Kirasir, didn’t make a breakthrough over the past three years.
As it was reported earlier, the higher instance court found that the initial decision to freeze the assets of Viktor and Oleksandr Yanukovych was legal. The EU court decision approved on October 19, specifically, says that ‘Viktor and Oleksandr Yanukovych’s fears of the biased Ukrainian judicial system cannot cast any discredit on charges against them – the charges of very specific cases of embezzlement of public funds’.
The court’s decision concerns only the sanctions imposed from March 2015 till March 2016; therefore, these restrictions lapse. However, such decision could mean that any attempts to appeal against the court decisions about sanctions imposed in 2016 and 2017 will fail as well.
