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Byalyatski may be freed if his debt has really been paid off, Lukashenka says

Human rights defender Ales Byalyatski may be amnestied if all the money he owed has really been paid, Alyaksandr Lukashenka said Tuesday in reply to a question from BelaPAN Director General Ales Lipay during a meeting with Belarusian media leaders.

When asked by Mr. Lipay why the 51-year-old Byalyatski could not be freed considering the fact that the amount that he was ordered to pay was paid off with donations a long time ago, Mr. Lukashenka said that he was unaware of that and tasked Alyaksandr Radzkow, first deputy head of the Presidential Administration, with finding out whether or not that was true.

“This is a serious argument. This is not about politics and the position of Byalyatski himself. I swear I did not and do not know him,” Mr. Lukashenka said, adding that paying taxes “is a sacred thing.”

If Mr. Byalyatski’s debt has really been paid, he may be considered for eligibility for amnesty, according to the Belarusian leader.

Ales Byalyatski, chairman of an unregistered Belarusian human rights organization called Vyasna (Spring) and vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, was arrested in Minsk on August 4, 2011.

On November 24, 2011, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on a charge of large-scale tax evasion. The charge stemmed from information about his bank accounts abroad, which was thoughtlessly provided by authorities in Lithuania and Poland under interstate legal assistance agreements. During his trial, Mr. Byalyatski insisted that the money transferred by various foundations to his bank accounts abroad had been intended to finance Vyasna's activities and therefore could not be viewed as his income subject to taxation.

On January 18, 2012, Mr. Byalyatski’s wife, Natallya Pinchuk, transferred a total of 757,526,717 rubels ($90,400 at the time) to the account of a Minsk district court to pay all what her husband had been ordered to pay in his criminal case, including his alleged tax debt, penalties and litigation costs. //BelaPAN