The so-called "tapegate" revolving around the murder of Georgiy Gongadze is but one of many recording-related scandals in Ukraine. One such long and torturous story (which also features Mykola Melnichenko and his recordings) involves a prominent banker whom former President Leonid Kuchma is said to have conspired to intimidate, jail and destroy. This story has gone largely unreported in the West. It is time to tell it.

On March 13, 2000, Borys Feldman, President of Sloviansky Bank, which at the time was Ukraine’s most profitable commercial bank, was arrested and charged by authorities with failing to pay income tax on a loan from the bank. Although this was not a criminal offense, he was held in pre-trial detention as tax police made attempts to uncover what they described as further crimes. No crimes were ever found.

Feldman????????s attorneys Andrey Fedur and Viktor Ageyev say the convictions fly in the face of common sense, not to mention the fact that the tax laws do not require borrowers to report loans as net income. The embezzlement charge appears equally ridiculous, they say, since Sloviansky Bank reported no unaccounted-for losses.

He was released on June 14, 2004.

The official in charge of pressing charges against Feldman was Svyatoslav Pyskun, who is now Ukraine’s Prosecutor General and in charge of the investigation of the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze.

During a conversation in May 2000, audio recordings were supposedly made of then President Loenid Kuchma and Deputy Prime Minister Mykola Azarov in which Kuchma allegedly suggests that Feldman be forcibly coerced into confessing. "Put him in a cell with convicts," Kuchma is heard saying. "Let them pound him."

If substantiated, these recordings show that government officials conspired to put Feldman in prison and put his bank out of business.

In a subsequent recording dated August 30, 2000, Azarov told Kuchma that he has made arrangements to have Feldman tried and convicted:

???????We agreed with the Luhansk court and have already acquainted a court chairman there with the case,??????? Azarov says. ???????I have talked about adding a charge. We have discussed this with the judges there, whom we can manipulate.???????

In April 2000, that court sentenced Feldman to four years imprisonment for tax evasion and nine years for embezzlement of funds from Sloviansky Bank. The bank was liquidated that year. On March 10, 2004, the Supreme Court upheld an appeal of the conviction, nullifying the first charge and cutting the sentence for embezzlement in half.

Peter Byrne, reporter for the Kyiv Post, points out that what happened to Borys Feldman corresponded almost exactly to how the conspiracy was planned in Kuchma’s office. At the time Viktor Yushchenko was Prime Minister.

In a February 2004 article, Byrne describes Feldman’s ordeal and illustrates what one judge calls "dysfunctional jurisprudence:"

The case has interested Yuri Lyubimov, the eminent Russian theater producer, who plans to stage an adaptation of Franz Kafka????????s ???????The Trial??????? based on Feldman????????s ordeal. The play is scheduled to premier at Moscow????????s Taganka Theater this fall, according to Ukrainian playwright Leonid Kryvoruchko.

???????The Trial??????? tells the story of Josef K., who is suddenly arrested, with no explanation given and for no reason he can imagine. As he wanders through a maze of bureaucracy, declaring his innocence, he becomes more and more entangled in the system, putting himself in ever-greater danger.

The world described by Kafka closely resembles Ukraine????????s judicial system, according to Kryvoruchko, with officials employing the same techniques as Joseph K.????????s accusers.

An interrogation of Feldman in 2001 by former State Tax Administration deputy head Syatoslav Pyskun became, arguably, Kafkaesque.

???????Why are you quibbling about the wording of our accusation against you???????? Feldman recalls being told. ???????Just take out the words you don????????t like in the indictment, and we????????ll do the rest.???????

In correspondence from prison with the Kyiv Post, Feldman writes that the interview came months before Pyskun????????s boss, then STA chief Mykola Azarov, blurted out to reporters that recordings made in 2000 in President Leonid Kuchma????????s office are ???????fakes??????? – recordings on which Kuchma and his cronies allegedly discuss framing Feldman. Azarov also claimed they were deliberately falsified on Feldman????????s instructions, to prove he had been unjustly accused.

The State Tax Administration also said that it had proof that Yulia Tymoshenko, then deputy Prime Minister, conspired with Feldman to embezzle $1 billion intended to pay for gas from Russia. From an interview with Feldman dated March 2001:

Q. Why did authorities go after your bank?

A. The motivation for launching the case against the bank is rather complicated.

First, many and varied officials initiated the action against the bank and me.

Secondly, their "desires" have changed over time, in accordance to both internal and external circumstances, which have changed over time.Audio records of conversations recorded Äby former security guard Mykhola MelnychenkoÅ reveal part of the reason authorities went after Sloviansky, as do recent statements made by public officials. From the beginning, authorities have tried to portray Sloviansky as the wallet or financial instrument of Tymoshenko.

The spin was simple: "It is necessary to destroy Sloviansky in order to deprive Tymoshenko of her financial empire."

Ä…Å

Q. Have authorities asked you to provide evidence against Tymoshenko or to arrange a plea bargain?

A. There are no grounds for me to come to any "accommodation" with law-enforcement agencies.

If rule of law existed in Ukraine, I could wait for an open legal trial, at which the arbitrariness of the charges against me would be exposed.

In the absence of rule of law, there’s little or no reason for them to talk to me at all.

I sought in writing to redress the actions of Ukraine’s State Tax Administration, asking the courts to overturn decisions taken against Sloviansky’s account-holders, who have suffered tremendous losses.  

To date, I have not received responses to formal applications as stipulated by law.The counter suits I filed against the State Tax Administration, General Prosecutor’s Office and NBU have been ignored.

Even though Article 55 of the Constitution provides citizens the right to seek legal redress for illegal – let alone criminal – acts committed by state officials, it remains almost impossible for ordinary citizens to avail themselves of this right in practice.Take, for example, the case brought by Mrs. Lesya Gongadze against the ÄDeputy General Prosecutor OleksyÅ Bahanets.

Tymoshenko was later cleared. A Q&A with her is here.

Feldman is out but some confusion remains as to what his present situation is. Immediately after his release, the court in Luhansk went about looking for more crimes with which to charge him.

This is but one such story from the reign of Leonid Kuchma. As the Gongadze case gets more and more attention – primarily here in the States because of its sensational details – it is important that the world knows about what has happened to people like Borys Feldman, a man Peter Byrne calls a "modest survivor of the Kuchma regime."

(This is cross-posted on Daniel’s blog, Bloggledygook, where he is researching this extensively.)