Defending Ukraine Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko at Trial

Daniel Horowitz represented Ukraine Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko against the Ukrainian deep state that engineered fake charges against Prime Minister Lazarenko.

Pavel Lazarenko was Ukraine’s Prime Minister from 1996 to 1997, but his career crashed when U.S. prosecutors in San Francisco were goaded into helping the established structure and at their request charged him with money laundering and fraud.

There was no fraud.

There was only a modern capitalist running the economy of a post communist country. Prime Minister Lazarenko had opened up the Ukraine economic system to competition so that smart business people could compete with the already established oligarchs in power. His greatest challenge was to Leonid Kuchma and his son in law, Victor Pinchuk. These politicians produced nothing of value and simply used their position to take the assets of Ukraine for their own use. As Lazarenko and the Kuchma clan locked horns, the United States took sides.

There are actual recordings of Kuchma saying that he wanted to feed his opposition to the United States. He then suggests that he should feed them Pavel Lazarenko.

The U.S. government accused him of siphoning off $250 million through shady deals in natural gas and agriculture, with funds allegedly moved through banks in Ukraine, Russia, Cyprus, and beyond. The case was a global puzzle, tying Lazarenko’s political power to massive financial misconduct.

This is when Daniel Horowitz took over the case. The international accusations were presented by the government at trial but Horowitz pulled off a major coup: he got all the international charges thrown out. All of the charges to Lazarenko’s overseas deals were dismissed. This gutted the prosecution’s case, which leaned heavily on his alleged global schemes.

But the victory story has a twist. While Horowitz’s defense triumphed on the international front, Lazarenko faced charges tied to a business partner who had fled Ukraine and asked the United States if he could testify against Pavel Lazarenko. He claimed that his business partnership with Lazarenko was one sided. He wanted Lazarenko convicted of cheating him while they made millions together in Ukraine. And then, he wanted millions of dollars paid to him from Lazarenko.

Unfortunately, Daniel Horowitz did not work on this set of charges. The trial on these charges was handled by another attorney. These led to a conviction, which Horowitz’s team calls a tragedy.

Since Horowitz won the international case, the United States has wasted millions of taxpayer’s dollars chasing Pavel Lazarenko’s money in a civil lawsuit that has lasted 20 years. The United States has not gotten a penny from that lawsuit and they never will. It simply a cover to pretend that the fake criminal charges were actually valid.

Daniel Horowitz knows that Pavel Lazarenko was a the most capitalistic, most pro united states leader in Ukraine and he was punished for up ending the status quo, cleaning out the old established powers and opening the doors to foreign investment and joint ventures with the United States.

To this day the oligarch class that attacked this pro U.S. leader is still power and wealthy.