TORIES PUSHING FOR TRANSFER OF CANADIAN FROM BULGARIAN JAIL

Richard Foot, CanWest News Service, Published: Tuesday, November 20, 2007.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and two of his most trusted ministers have for more than a year been quietly pressuring the Bulgarian government to transfer home to Canada a former millionaire Canadian businessman jailed overseas since 1996 on charges of fraud and embezzlement, CanWest News Service has learned.

Despite numerous diplomatic efforts - including a meeting in Sofia last year between Bulgaria's top prosecutor and Secretary of State Jason Kenney, at which Kenney pleaded for the return of 55-year-old Michael Kapoustin - Bulgaria refuses to transfer a man it once labelled an international swindler.

As a result, Canada is turning up the heat, invoking for the first time an international treaty that forces the unco-operative Bulgarian government into mediation talks.

On Thursday, a Canadian delegation will square off against Bulgarian officials in Strasbourg, France, headquarters of the Council of Europe - a European human rights body created in the wake of the Second World War to oversee, among other things, prisoner-transfer rules among the countries of Europe, Canada and the United States.

The mediation process follows months of failed intervention by Kenney and Harper - who has lobbied the Bulgarian president on the Kapoustin case - and by Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who is responsible for prisoner transfers to Canada and is also the MP for Kapoustin's British Columbia-based family.

Such efforts are a marked contrast to the Harper government's treatment of some other Canadians imprisoned abroad.
Since last year the Conservatives have denied the transfers of at least 17 Canadian citizens jailed in the U.S., even though their transfers to Canadian prisons were approved by U.S. authorities.

The government is also refusing to advocate against the death row sentence of Ronald Smith, an Albertan convicted of murder in Montana.

Kapoustin's repatriation, however, is "a priority for our government," said Kenney in a letter last December to Bulgaria's prosecutor general, adding, "Our government is determined to robustly defend the interests of Canadian citizens abroad."
Kapoustin was born in Yugoslavia but grew up in Toronto and Vancouver after his family immigrated to Canada in the 1950s. He became a high-profile entrepreneur in Bulgaria during the 1990s, as capitalism replaced communism following the breakup of the Soviet bloc.

"Michael was a very high flyer in Bulgaria in the post-Soviet period," says Gar Pardy, Canada's former director general of consular affairs, who has taken up Kapoustin's case in retirement. "He was running a bunch of companies and there was a lot of money on the go.

"He had a lot of investments - in an oil refinery project, an importing-exporting business - and he also funded scientific research into HIV."

Kapoustin's troubles began in 1994 when he began receiving anonymous threats to abandon his businesses and leave the country.

The following year, Bulgarian officials charged him with tax evasion, money laundering, fraud and embezzlement. Authorities shut down Kapoustin's companies and seized assets he claims were worth more than $11 million.