Kiev district court to resume consideration of former interior minister's case.

KIEV, June 30 (Itar-Tass) -- A district court in the Ukrainian capital
city on Thursday resumes hearings of the case of Ukraine's former interior
minister Yuri Lutsenko who is accused of office abuse and faces up to ten
years in prison.
The country's former prime minister and leader of the Batkivshchina
party Yulia Timoshenko said she would attend the court session to "express
support" to the former minister in her government. "I will come in any
case. Now there are too many politically repressed people in Ukraine, who
are kept in custody in order to weaken the opposition," she said.
The same court is currently considering Timoshenko's case as well. She
is charged with office abuse while signing gas contracts with Russia in
2009. According to investigators, Timoshenko's actions resulted in losses
of more than 1.5 billion hrivnas (about 200 million U.S. dollars). On
Wednesday, the judge handed an indictment copy to Timoshenko. The former
prime minister requested the Pechersky District Court to give three days
to study the indictment and three weeks to finalize the study of the
criminal case. The judge delayed a next court session until July 4.
It is expected that Lutsenko's defence will appeal to hold the trial
outside Kiev and to disqualify the judge. Lutsenko intends to apply to the
European Court of Human Rights to challenge the action of judge Sergei
Vovk, who refused to change the measure of restraint. Lutsenko has been
kept at a pretrial detention centre since December 26, 2010, while the
trial started only on May 23.
Lutsenko is accused of illicit hiring of his driver and provision of
housing for the latter. The former interior minister is also charges with
misappropriation of funds allocated to fund festivities on the occasion of
the Day of Police. According to investigators, Lutsenko inflicted losses
to the state of about one million hrivnas (125,000 U.S. dollars).