The European Union promises to fix the list of the Belarusian officials and sanctions, applied to them, which came into force on 2 February. According to a European diplomat, responsible for relations with Belarus, it is supposed to remove a "dead" official from the list, as well as to impose economic sanctions on Yuri Sivakov, for only visa sanctions are applied to him now.
According to the European diplomats, the EU member-states understand that «this guy (Yuri Sivakov) should be listed.» «We are working on this issue at the level of heads of mission in Minsk,» he said and added that these «technical changes are easy to make.»
According to the newspaper EUobserver, 64-year-old Yuri Sivakov is currently vice-chancellor at Minsk Institute of Management and also a teacher of criminology at the Belarusian Academy of Interior Ministry.
Now the EU has no information about whether the former head of the Belarusian Interior Ministry is engaged in any commercial activity, however, according to the diplomatic sources, he was in charge of the association «Honour» in 2006, suspected by the U.S. of laundering $1.5 million a day for the officials of President Alexander Lukashenko.
As Telegraf previously reported, the EU imposed visa sanctions on Yuri Sivakov years ago because of his alleged involvement in the murders of the Belarusian dissidents. Nevertheless, in 2006 the EU excluded him from the list of Belarusian officials, whose accounts were frozen, though, did not include him in the list in 2011 as well.
