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Ales Byalyatski asked Polish diplomats not to disclose his bank account details, newspaper says

Ales Byalyatski, a Belarusian human rights defender who is now in prison, asked Polish diplomats not to provide the Belarusian authorities with information about his bank accounts abroad, reported the prominent Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, BelaPAN said.

Mr. Byalyatski, currently 50 years of age, personally visited the Polish embassy in Minsk in June 2011 and asked diplomats not to disclose his bank account details, the newspaper said.

His wife Natallya Pinchuk and associate Valyantsin Stefanovich confirmed that the visit had taken place. According to the report, Mr. Byalyatski was assured that such disclosure was impossible, and that Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski would be informed about his request.

In an interview with Rzeczpospolita, Marcin Bosacki, spokesman for the Polish foreign ministry, denied that Mr. Sikorski had received such information. He refused to say whether or not Mr. Byalyatski had met with Polish diplomats in Minsk. "We cannot speak about the possible contacts between our diplomats and Belarusian oppositionists, especially those who, like Ales Byalyatski, are currently in prison," Mr. Bosacki explained.

Neither Mr. Sikorski nor any other representative of the foreign ministry had told Prosecutor General Andrzej Seremet that legal information about Mr. Byalyatski had to be treated differently from information about other citizens of Belarus, Mateusz Martyniuk, spokesman for Poland's Public Prosecutor General's Office, told Rzeczpospolita. According to him, Messrs. Sikorski and Seremet had a conversation about Mr. Byalyatski already after the disclosure of his bank account details.

Ales Byalyatski, chairman of a Belarusian human rights organization called Vyasna (Spring) and vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, was arrested in Minsk on August 4, 2011.

On November 24, 2011, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on a charge of large-scale tax evasion. The charge stemmed from information about his bank accounts abroad, which was provided by authorities in Lithuania and Poland under interstate legal assistance agreements. During his trial, Mr. Byalyatski insisted that the money transferred by various foundations to his bank accounts abroad had been intended to finance Vyasna's activities and therefore could not be viewed as his income subject to taxation.