NEW YORK, April 27 – Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has sued Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash, a close ally of the President Viktor Yanukovych, in U.S. court alleging fraud, human rights violations and racketeering.

According to papers filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Tymoshenko brought the suit against Firtash and Swiss-based RosUkrEnergo AG, a gas trader jointly owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom and Firtash.

Tymoshenko accused the defendants of defrauding Ukraine's citizenry by manipulating an arbitration court ruling, "undermining the rule of law in Ukraine."

“This is my gift to Yanukovych-Firtash,” Tymoshenko wrote on her blog on Twitter. “We begin international investigation.”

The lawsuit comes two weeks after the Ukrainian authorities have launched investigation against Tymoshenko accusing her of “exceeding authority” while negotiating as the prime minister a 10-year natural gas agreement with Russia in January 2009.

The agreement paved the way to a shakeup of the natural gas market in Ukraine, which had eliminated RosUkrEnergo and had increased the role of Gazprom on the Ukrainian market.

Tymoshenko’s allegations stem from an international arbitration court ruling in Stockholm last year that ordered Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz UKrayiny to pay RosUkrEnergo 11 billion cubic meters of gas to compensate for fuel it had "expropriated" plus 1.1 billion cubic meters as a penalty.

Naftogaz and Gazprom said in November 2010 they had agreed to a settlement under which Naftogaz would return 12.1 billion cubic meters of gas -- worth almost $3 billion -- to RosUkrEnergo, while the Swiss gas trader would redeem $1.7 billion of debt to Naftogaz and $810 million to Gazprom.

According to the suit, the Stockholm ruling was "widely perceived as a means of generating huge sums of cash with which Firtash and his associates could continue to illegally fund the pervasive" corruption that it said marks every level of government, "while at the same time suppressing political dissent through intimidation, racketeering and other violations of fundamental human and political rights," Reuters reported.

The suit, a class action on behalf of the Ukrainian people, was filed in U.S. federal court under the Alien Torts Statute, which accommodates actions in U.S. courts to uphold international law, as well as the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Practices Act (RICO).

According to the suit, which seeks unspecified damages the Yanukovych administration has "launched a wave of arrests and investigations aimed at ... Tymoshenko and her political allies in ... a concerted campaign to intimidate, suppress and ultimately eliminate any and all political opposition in Ukraine."

Tymoshenko, who served as the prime minister in 2005 and against from December 2007 to March 2010, said the reason for filing the lawsuit in the U.S. court is that the Ukrainian legal system has been corrupt.

“Our courts are only capable of servicing the authorities,” Tymoshenko said on Twitter. “Let’s defend the interests of Ukraine in international courts.”

Tymoshenko, who lost a presidential election to Yanukovych in February 2010, signed an accord with Russia in January 2009 that eliminated RosUkrEnergo from the market.

RosUkrEnergo claimed Tymoshenko had effectively confiscated the natural gas and appealed to the Stockholm Arbitration Tribunal.

The tribunal ruled on June 8 that Ukraine’s Naftogaz should restore 12.1 billion cubic meters of gas, including penalties, to RosUkrEnergo by Sept. 1, 2010. Tymoshenko disputes the claim. (tl/sb/ez)