Ukraine's prosecutor's office said today it had re-opened a 2004 criminal case against former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko on accusations she had tried to bribe Supreme Court judges.
Ms Tymoshenko, who lost to president Viktor Yanukovich in a bitter campaign for the presidency in February, immediately accused her old foe of launching "open, undisguised repression" against her.
A statement from the prosecutor's main investigation section said Ms Tymoshenko had been called in on Wednesday and formally told that the case, which had been prematurely halted in January 2005 without a proper investigation, had been re-opened.
"At the present moment, a pre-trial investigation of the case has been resumed," the statement said.
Tymoshenko told journalists she had been summoned to see investigators again on May 17th.
"Yanukovich is now hauling out old cases which will lead nowhere. He is creating open, undisguised repression," she said as she left the prosecutor's office.
The fiery Ms Tymoshenko linked the move to the May 17th-18th visit to Kiev of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. "Yanukovich wants to demonstrate how he deals with the opposition ...," she said.
"Once again it shows he is not a Ukrainian patriot and he is not the president of Ukraine. He is simply a puppet, ready to do whatever is required to humiliate and bleed Ukraine of its life's blood," she said.
Ms Tymoshenko was in the opposition at the time of the alleged offences and later in 2004 went on to lead, with ex-president Viktor Yushchenko, the 'Orange Revolution' street demonstrations that robbed Yanukovich of his first chance of being president.
In 2001 she spent some weeks in a Kiev prison on charges of financial violations relating to her activities in trading in gas imports in the mid-1990s.
She was released without trial and she has always said the legal action against her was politically motivated by the then president Leonid Kuchma.
Last month, Mr Yanukovich's prime minister, Mykola Azarov, charged Ms Tymoshenko's government with the loss of about $378 million, received from selling Ukrainian carbon quotas to Japan.
It said the government had received the money in "foreign ecological investment" but not a single ecological and energy saving project had been realised.
In 2009 Ukraine sold 30 million carbon emission rights to Japan for $375 million and had said it hopes to earn $2 billion or more from the sale of the right to pollute carbon credits that it does not use.
Reuters