Oleksandr Tymoshenko

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Oleksander Tymoshenko (Ukrainian: Олександр Тимошенко) is the husband of the current Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko and (according to his wife) a businessman^[1].

[edit] Biography

Oleksandr was the son of a mid-level Communist Party official. According to The Times, he met Yulia when he misdialed her number. He called back and they eventually agreed to meet and quickly fell in love.^[2] They were married in 1979 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, and have a daughter, Evgenia (b. 1980).

On August 18, 2000 Oleksandr, a board member of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) Corporation (of which Yulia was general director), was arrested along with the company's managing director, Valery Falkovich. He was charged with embezzling $800,000 in public funds and forging customs documents to import gas from Russia - all based on activities from the 1990s. The following March, he was transferred to a Zhytomyr oblast jail so as to avoid communication between Oleksandr, Falkovich (who was transferred to a Chernihiv jail at that time) and Yulia, who by that time was also under arrest. On August 8, 2001, Russian prosecutors handed over information to Ukrainian officials implicating Yulia and Oleksandr in customs violations. The following day, a Kyiv district court released Oleksandr and Falkovich due to lack of evidence.^[3][4] The prosecutor's office, however, appealed the ruling and continued the case against Oleksandr, leading him to spend two years in hiding to avoid prosecution on charges he and his wife say are trumped up.^[5][6] In another ruling, the Kyiv district court ruled the charges against Oleksandr "groundless."^[7] Charges were finally dropped in May, 2002.

The couple appear together in public very rarely.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] References