It is clear that Lazarenko's lawyers and Lazarenko himself have nothing more to say and that he is clutching at straws like a drowning man

Leonid Kuchma

"Let us sign such an agreement. Why is the American side behaving in such a way?"

Mr Kuchma added that the case had undermined trust in the American legal system, which was using the absence of an agreement to get money from Ukraine.

"If he had no money, they would throw him out. But instead they have been draining off Ukrainian money under the pretext that there is no agreement," Mr Kuchma said.

Ukrainian charges

The Ukrainian authorities accuse Mr Lazarenko of having profited by buying and selling natural gas contracts as energy minister, and siphoning off millions of dollars from state programmes as prime minister in 1996-97.

Kuchma is accused of wrongdoing by former PM

He is also charged with arranging at least three contract killings, including that of prominent Ukrainian politician Yevhen Shcherban in 1995.

The US indictment says that Mr Lazarenko and his partners sent about $114m from Ukraine to US bank and brokerage accounts he controlled between 1994 and 1999.

With Ukrainian investigators probing his business dealings, Mr Lazarenko fled to Switzerland with a Panamanian passport in December 1998.

Mr Lazarenko fled to the US in 1999, skipping $2.5m a bail order, after the Swiss conducted their own investigations into his financial affairs.

'Political vendetta'

Mr Lazarenko denies money-laundering charges and has asked for political asylum in the US, saying he is the victim of a vendetta by his political enemies.

He recently accused the Ukrainian leadership, including Mr Kuchma, of embezzling IMF credits sent to support the national currency and finance the budget deficit.

But Mr Kuchma said this was "nonsense", as only the National Bank had access to these funds.

"It is clear that Lazarenko's lawyers and Lazarenko himself have nothing more to say and that he is clutching at straws like a drowning man," he said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.