Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko was sentenced to nine years in prison and fined $10 million in a U.S. court on Friday after being convicted in 2004 of extortion and money laundering, Reuters reported. "A significant sentence is appropriate," U.S. District Court Judge Martin Jenkins said before pronouncing the sentence. Under house arrest since his detention, Lazarenko became a multimillionaire while in power during the chaotic early post-Soviet days of the 1990s. He is the first foreign leader to be sentenced in a U.S. court since Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1992. Lazarenko, who looked nervous prior to the hearing, did not show any visible reaction and took notes as he listened to a translation of the judge through headphones. U.S. prosecutors had sought a sentence of more than 18 years plus restitution for $43 million. His lawyers asked that he not be subject to any more detention after serving five years in home detention in San Francisco. Jenkins said he would rule in the next 90 days on the restitution and forfeiture issues. A jury convicted Lazarenko, Ukraine's prime minister from 1996 to 1997, of 29 counts of extortion, laundering money through California banks, fraud, and transportation of stolen property. Jenkins later threw out 15 counts, finding that there was not enough evidence to sustain convictions on those charges. The tangled case involved many firms and banks and different countries, including Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. The matter was so complex that U.S. prosecutors spent six years building a case. Evidence from the trial shed light on the often murky and sometimes dangerous world of business and politics that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lazarenko's attorney tried unsuccessfully to convince a jury that was acceptable, even if odd to American sensibilities, for a Ukrainian politician to earn millions on the side in the free-wheeling post-Communist era.
