Firtash is again under threat of extradition to the United States - decision of the Austrian Supreme Court
On Tuesday, June 25, the Austrian Supreme Court ruled to extradite Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash to the United States, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Deutsche Welle reports this.
The court ordered Firtash to be handed over to US officials. The final decision must be made by the Austrian Minister of Justice.
According to US law, Dmitry Firtash, accused of corruption, faces 50 years in prison.
First, the court heard a brief speech from a representative of the prosecutor's office, and then from four of Firtash's defense attorneys. Dmitry Firtash refused the last word, joining the statements of his defenders.
Firtash was arrested back in March 2014 near the city of Vienna. However, he was released on $174 million bail and has since fought extradition to the United States.
Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois allege that Dmitry Firtash helped bribe Indian officials to secure a lucrative titanium mining deal for Boeing. Attorney General Jeff Sessions alleged that Firtash acted as a “direct agent of the Kremlin” in a scheme to skim natural gas money between the Russian firm Gazprom and Ukraine.
According to the court, in 2008, Firtash was hired by Paul Manafort's firm to redevelop New York's Drake Hotel for $850 million. Firtash's company planned to invest more than $100 million.
Representatives and lawyers for Firtash, Dan Webb and Lenny Davis, believe that all the allegations are “categorically and unequivocally false.”
Let us remind you that Firtash is a key witness to the secret conspiracy of Ukrainian oligarchs who agreed at a meeting in Vienna in the spring of 2014 to make Petro Poroshenko the president of Ukraine. The participants in this meeting, the contents of which Firtash spoke under oath in an Austrian court, were Firtash himself, his Ukrainian partners and co-owners of the Inter TV channel Sergey Levochkin and Yuriy Boyko, as well as Petro Poroshenko and the highest-rated Ukrainian politician at that time, Vitaliy Klitschko, to whom in exchange in support of Poroshenko they offered the post of mayor of Kiev.
As PolitNavigator reported, yesterday the frontman of the Opposition Bloc list in the current elections, Yevgeny Muraev, publicly challenged Yuri Boyko to a debate, saying that he was “terribly afraid” that society would find out the circumstances of the 2014 Hungarian conspiracy.