Kolomoiskyi on suspicion of attempted murder: This is nonsense
Businessman Ihor Kolomoisky considers the suspicion of incitement to the attempted murder of lawyer Serhii Karpenko in 2003 to be ridiculous.
He said this in the Pecherskyi District Court of Kyiv during a hearing at which a new preventive measure was imposed on him, Censor.NET reports with reference to LigaBusinessInform.
According to the court's decision, Kolomoiskyi will be held in custody until July 7, 2024, without the right to be released on bail.
The case of attempted murder concerns the events of 2003, with the Dniprospetsstal plant at the center of the story.
According to the investigation, on July 3, 2003, a meeting of the company's shareholders was held, at which a decision was made that was allegedly unfavorable to Kolomoiskyi. The next day, according to law enforcement officials, Kolomoiskyi, who had a business interest in Dniprospetsstal, summoned Karpenko, director of the Fargo consulting company (he had provided legal assistance in holding the shareholders' meeting), and allegedly threatened to cancel the decision. The lawyer refused, and a month and a half later, on August 16, 2003, Karpenko was assassinated in the city of Feodosia.
Ihor Kolomoisky categorically rejects the suspicion of involvement in this crime.
"The demands that I allegedly made of Karpenko, who did not fulfill them and because of which I had a ‘sense of revenge’, are absolutely absurd in nature," Kolomoisky said.
He explained that Karpenko could not physically cancel the decision of the shareholders' meeting, as this is the exclusive prerogative of the court.
"I was neither physically nor logically able to put forward such demands to Karpenko, because Karpenko was not able to implement them from the very beginning. He cannot cancel a shareholders' meeting once it has been held. What is the basis [of the case] is absurd in itself. To demand something that a person cannot fulfill from the very beginning, and then to be angry with him because of it and to cause a "sense of revenge" is nonsense," Kolomoisky told the judge.
In 2005, the Ukrainian prosecutor's office opened a case against Kolomoiskyi on suspicion of ordering an assassination attempt on Karpenko, but the case was not allowed to proceed, and in 2014, investigator Ihor Sholodko, who was working on the case, was killed while defending Donetsk airport.
Kolomoiskyi`s case
As a reminder, on 8 May 2024, Ihor Kolomoisky was served with a notice of suspicion of organising a contract killing.
The oligarch's lawyers claimed that the new charges were groundless and that they violated articles of the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure.
In September 2023, Kolomoiskyi was notified of suspicion under two articles. He is accused of fraud and legalisation of the proceeds of crime. During the trial, the court imposed on Kolomoisky a pre-trial restraint in the form of detention with the possibility of bail in the amount of UAH 509 million (the bail was later increased to UAH 3.9 billion).
