The ruling ends more than a decade of legal proceedings, which at one point included a record EUR125 million ($145 million) bail set in 2014.
U.S. authorities had accused Firtash of conspiring to pay $18.5 million in bribes to Indian officials to secure a $500 million titanium‐production enterprise in India. Firtash has denied the charges, calling them politically motivated attempts to influence Ukrainian politics.
Firtash moved his companies to Vienna and has lived there since posting bail in 2014. In June 2021, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council sanctioned him for supplying titanium to Russian military industry. About a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, he urged Ukraine to abandon its NATO bid and declare neutrality. After the invasion began, he sought permission to return to Ukraine to help defend his country.
Firtash accumulated his wealth between 2004 and 2009 as the intermediary between Russia’s natural gas monopoly Gazprom and Ukraine’s state-owned Naftogaz through his company RosUkrEnergo. By buying Russian gas at discounted rates and reselling it in Ukraine at higher prices, he accrued an estimated $3 billion, according to Reuters.