Oleksandr Tymoshenko

Biography

Oleksandr was the son of a mid-level Communist Party official Hennady Tymoshenko. According to The Times, he met Yulia Telegina when he misdialed her number. He called back and they eventually agreed to meet and quickly fell in love. The pair were married in 1979 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, and have a daughter, Yevhenia (Eugenia) (b. 1980).

On August 18, 2000 Oleksandr, a (along with his father Hennadiy Tymoshenko) board member of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) Corporation (of which Yulia was general director), was arrested along with the company's managing director, Valery Falkovich. He was charged with embezzling $800,000 in public funds and forging customs documents to import gas from Russia - all based on activities from the 1990s. The following March, he was transferred to a Zhytomyr Oblast jail so as to avoid communication between Oleksandr, Falkovich (who was transferred to a Chernihiv jail at that time) and Yulia, who by that time was also under arrest. On August 8, 2001, Russian prosecutors handed over information to Ukrainian officials implicating Yulia and Oleksandr in customs violations. The following day, a Kyiv district court released Oleksandr and Falkovich due to lack of evidence. The prosecutor's office, however, appealed the ruling and continued the case against Oleksandr, leading him to spend two years in hiding to avoid prosecution on charges he and his wife say are trumped up. In another ruling, the Kyiv district court ruled the charges against Oleksandr "groundless." Charges were finally dropped in May, 2002. Tymoshenko's father-in-law has also been arrested in connecting with this case, he was released in 2003. According to Mrs. Tymoshenko her spouse has never been personally involved in Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc.

In December 2010, Tymoshenko was admitted to hospital, according to Oleksandr Turchynov, “in rather grave condition”.

Tymoshenko appears very rarely with his wife in public and never gives interviews and does not (publicly) comment on the work of his wife and their personal life. Tymoshenko's hypocorism for her husband is "Sasha".

Early January 2012 Tymoshenko was granted asylum in the Czech Republic that he had requested at the end of the previous year. According to him (in February 2012) "This decision was made so that we should not give the authorities additional opportunities to exert pressure on my wife". He also claimed he could not return to Ukraine because "the first thing after arrival I will be certainly arrested". Since 2000 Tymoshenko owned 33% share of International Industrial Projects, s.r.o., a small company in the Czech city Ústí nad Labem. The company did not have any web presence and no contact could be found on the internet. It didn't ever publish information mandated by the Czech law and was liquidated in February 2012. Tymoshenko also has lasting contacts with several top Czech politicians. He is alleged to own a house in Lidice since 2000 but denied it on a post in his wife's blog saying that his asylum in the Czech Republic was temporary. On 24 February 2014, just after the "Maidan revolution" and the release from prison of his wife, he returned to Ukraine.