Court completes consideration of official documents; no justification for sanctions against Poroshenko – attorney
The panel of judges of the Cassation Administrative Court within the Supreme Court, which is considering the lawsuit of MP, leader of the European Solidarity party Petro Poroshenko, to revoke the decree on sanctions against him, has completed the consideration of documents with the official use stamp, on the basis of which the relevant decision of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) was adopted, the political force said on the website on Friday.
As attorney-at-law Illia Novikov said, there is no explanation in the documents why the authorities needed to impose sanctions against Poroshenko. He also claims that representatives of the authorities in the closed part of the court session also stated that the sanctions against Poroshenko were imposed allegedly for educational purposes.
"We were promised that we would hear a response from President Zelenskyy's representative in a closed session, for which sanctions were imposed. We heard with our own ears that the person against whom sanctions were imposed should think about his behavior. That is, in the eyes of the court, although behind closed doors from the public, they are saying such nonsense that the sanctions are educational in nature. Zelenskyy believes that he is a teacher for all of us here, in particular Poroshenko, and he can afford it," Novikov said.
In addition, the lawyer claims that some of the documents provided by the defendants were falsified. "Apparently, part of the evidence was falsified. In particular, today we examined a disk that was supposedly recorded in the Cabinet of Ministers and submitted on the evening of February 12 for consideration at the NSDC meeting. It was a disk with appendices to the Cabinet of Ministers' proposal on sanctions. The files were saved on this disk on February 13. There is an explanation from the NSDC secretariat that this disk with a cover letter from Denys Shmyhal, the then Prime Minister of Ukraine, was registered only at 23:13 on February 13, a day after this same disk was supposedly considered at the NSDC meeting. The metadata of the files, that is, the time of creation of the files, completely shows that this disk was played back retrospectively," the attorney said.
The next hearing in the case will be held on November 21.
