Reuters reporting: Industrialist Dmytro Firtash, one of Ukraine’s most influential oligarchs with close links to Russia through his gas interests, has been arrested in Austria at the request of the United States. Austria’s Federal Crime Agency said on Thursday that Firtash was held on Wednesday on suspicion of violating laws on bribery and forming a criminal organization in the course of foreign business deals.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said: “Our embassy in Austria has confirmed that Dmytro Firtash has been detained at the request of the (U.S.) Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is now being held in a detention center.”
The detention of Firtash, 48, whose business concerns in gas trading and chemicals thrived under ousted President Viktor Yanukovich, is the highest profile arrest in the wake of political turmoil which installed new pro-Western authorities in power in Kiev in February.
Firtash’s company Group DF said the FBI case appeared related to an investment project in 2006 which another group source said was in India.
The statement from Group DF said: “We know that the actions of the law enforcement organs of Austria in relation to Dmytro Firtash are not linked with the situation in Ukraine, not with the activity of the Group in Europe and America but relate to an investment project in 2006.
Forbes Ukraine magazine last year put Firtash in 14th place on its Ukrainian rich list, setting his fortune at $673 million.
Though he is nowhere near as wealthy as the country’s top oligarchs, Firtash’s close links to Russia, and possibly to the Kremlin via the energy sector, make him one of the most influential figures in Ukraine.
Firtash is not named on an initial European Union list of Ukrainians suspected of misusing state funds and violating human rights and whose assets are to be frozen as a result of the crisis over the Russian incursion into Ukraine’s Crimea.
He is one of several Ukrainian oligarchs who have called for Ukraine’s territorial integrity to be maintained in the face of Russia’s military incursion into Crimea.
U.S. prosecutors have not announced any charges against Firtash, and a database of criminal cases did not show any on Thursday. The United States has had an extradition treaty with Austria since 2000, according to the U.S. State Department.
Before Yanukovich’s dramatic and swift fall from power, Firtash’s contacts made him even more powerful than Ukraine’s richest man, steel and chemicals billionaire Rinat Akhmetov.
A year ago, in what was seen then as a move that would help Yanukovich secure re-election in 2015, Firtash bought a leading TV station Inter for a reported $2.5 billion.
