Man back in Vancouver after 12 years in Bulgarian jail
A Canadian businessman who spent a dozen years in a Bulgarian prison arrived in Vancouver late Sunday, and hugged the son he never got to see grow up.
Michael Kapoustin, 55, from the Penticton, B.C. area, has been imprisoned since the mid-1990s on fraud charges that he has denied committing.
“There are no words to express my feelings right now. Joy. It’s the end of a 13-year nightmare,” said Kapoustin during a stopover in Toronto earlier in the day.
“You have to imagine one-fourth of your life going by in a country where you don’t speak the language, and you don’t have contact with family. You’re solitary; you’re beaten,” he said.
“It’s been an experience and it almost feels like it happened to someone else.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper personally called the Bulgarian president in 2006 to ask for Kapoustin’s release to Canada.
Conservative MP and secretary of state for multiculturalism Jason Kenney visited Bulgaria last year for three days to work for Kapoustin’s release.
Kenney spoke to CTV Newsnet and said the way Kapoustin’s case was handled raised a number of flags for him.
“He had not (had the) benefit of basic due process or natural justice in the way his case had been handled,” he said Sunday.
Kapoustin spent five years in pre-trial custody and was originally acquitted. But an appeal court convicted him of a charge that he had not originally been charged with, he said.
Kenney added there are thousands of Canadians in legal trouble abroad and that working through each case takes time.
“We treat each consular case on an individual basis,” said Kenney, who was contacted by the man’s family about his plight several years ago.
“Sometimes these cases are fairly straightforward, and others a lot more complicated.”
The court found Kapoustin guilty of embezzling about $4 million in 1994 and 1995 from Bulgarian investors.
He has maintained his innocence.