KIEV, January 26 - RAPSI. President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Jean-Claude Mignon is ready to help former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who is serving her sentence in prison, Tymoshenko's website reported on Wednesday.

The PACE president wrote a letter and gave it to Yevgenia Tymoshenko for her mother in Strasbourg.

"I am very concerned by the situation with Yulia Tymoshenko, who I know personally. She should know that she has many friends, that we haven't forgotten about her, and that great efforts will be made to help her in this situation," the website reads, in part.
Mignon met Tymoshenko in Kiev last May.

Yevgenia thanked the PACE president for his support and emphasized that "despite all the attempts by Yanukovych's regime, her mother hasn't broken."

Tymoshenko was sentenced in October to seven years in prison for abuse of power in signing gas contracts between Ukraine's Naftogaz and Russia's Gazprom in 2009. In late December she was taken to the Kharkiv penal colony. Soon after the sentence was passed the tax police resumed investigation into four criminal cases against Tymoshenko.

The cases bear on her work as head of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine in the 1990s. In the UESU case Tymoshenko has been charged with attempted embezzlement of public funds, organizing a non-disclosure of foreign currency proceeds amounting to more than $165 million, and tax evasion in the amount of over $5.8 million.

The Ukrainian Security Service is investigating the cases which were consolidated into one.

The security service closed a criminal case regarding the concealment of currency proceeds on January 18 as the offence has been removed from the Criminal Code. Meanwhile, it will continue investigating Tymoshenko's other crimes.

Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General Evgeny Blajivsky said the day before that Tymoshenko's case concerning her activities at the head of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) will be brought to the court and the trial will be public.

Attorneys insist that their client's health is getting worse with every day and she just cannot walk on her own, but the penitentiary authorities assure that Tymoshenko's condition does not cause anxiety. Her supporters believe her prosecution is driven by politics, while the authorities have denied such allegations.