Rumors about Kravchuk abound as press reports on German story (09/29/96)

Rumors about Kravchuk abound as press reports on German story

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - When rumors fly in Ukraine they zoom. When they involve politicians they go supersonic. The latest one involves Leonid Kravchuk, first president of Ukraine and now a deputy in Parliament.

The rumor is that in December 1995 Mr. Kravchuk flew into Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, and while going through customs was found to have $30 million in greenbacks in a suitcase that belonged to him. He is alleged to have told Israeli customs officials that it was his own cash. It is not known what happened to the cash or whether he was allowed into the coun

Press has field day

The press here has had a field day trying to get more information. Nothing has turned up. It has reached a point that the Procurator General's Office has started an investigation. For his part Mr. Kravchuk has denied all allegations and has stated that he has not been in Israel since 1993, when he traveled to the country as president of Ukraine on an official visit.

The newspaper Vechirniy Kyiv stated in an article dated September 19 that it has on good source found evidence to support the former president's claim. Of course, it could not reveal that source.

This latest controversy surrounding a Ukrainian politician began with an article printed in the German magazine Focus, and did not become a controversy until the Russian newspaper Izvestia reprinted it on September 18, some four months after the German magazine released the original story.

Sources not revealed

The Focus article makes no effort to reveal its source for the accusation, nor does it bring forth substantiating facts for the allegations. The article, according to Vechirniy Kyiv and Holos Ukrainy, the official newspaper of the Parliament, was a piece on corruption at the highest levels of Ukraine's government. The story discloses that, allegedly, Yukhym Zviahilsky, Ukraine's former prime minister, siphoned $5 million in funds from oil sales into his private bank accounts and describes the allegedly criminal financial dealings of the Black Sea Shipping Co. of Odessa.

In the story, Mr. Kravchuk becomes a player as another example of political corruption. His close association with Pavlo Kudiukyn, head of BLASCO, is the basis for asserting the likelihood of the suitcase incident.

Focus published the piece in the spring and has admitted that the article is based on a book printed in April 1996 by Jurgen Rota, "The Russian Mafia." The author and the book are now in litigation. Vechirniy Kyiv does ask one very relevant question: Why did Izvestia wait until now to publish a story on the matter and the book?

Mr. Kravchuk maintains that the whole matter is just another effort to "give Ukraine a certain face before the world," that is, to discredit the country. He blamed the secret services of certain countries for releasing disinformation, although he could not name the country or countries.

Where's the beef?

Thus far, few facts exist to discredit the Focus story, on the one hand, or Mr. Kravchuk's claims of innocence and that he is being used as a vehicle to discredit Ukraine, on the other.

Ukraine's Procurator General, however, has not put away the file on the issue. His only remarks to this point, given on Ukrainian TV, are that "I have not seen any hard evidence, but there does exist some information, which we are reviewing." Probably the dozen or so articles that have been written on the allegation, all full of conjecture and presumption, but none with any additional information.