The story is about the criminal case against Pavlo Lazarenko, a Ukrainian politician and Prime Minister of Ukraine in 1996-1997. He was accused of money laundering to foreign accounts in 1994-1999.
According to the investigation, during his tenure as the head of the Dnipro Regional State Administration, Pavlo Lazarenko was engaged in money laundering through the private gas company United Energy Systems of Ukraine, which is associated with Yulia Tymoshenko.
Pavlo Lazarenko was dismissed from the post of Prime Minister of Ukraine on July 2, 1997, and in 1998 the Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal case for embezzlement of state property on a particularly large scale. According to the investigation, Lazarenko withdrew the money with the help of the Turkish company United Energy International Limited.
On February 14, 1999, Pavlo Lazarenko was detained in New York with forged documents. In 2004, during the trial in San Francisco, the main prosecution witness was Petro Kyrychenko, a former associate of Lazarenko. The total amount of stolen funds amounted to $114 million.
In 2006, a California court sentenced Pavlo Lazarenko to 9 years in prison. He was released on November 1, 2012.