MARCH 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Maxim Bakiyev, the son of former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, is living in a £3.5m ($5m) mansion in southern England, the transparency lobby group Global Witness reported. The mansion is owned through various off-shore companies. Mr Bakiyev is wanted in Bishkek for various financial crimes.
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(News report from Issue No. 225, published on April 12015)
MARCH 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Prosecutors in France have charged Jean-Francois Etienne des Rosaies, an ex-presidential adviser, with corruption over a 2010 deal to sell 295 trains and 45 helicopters to Kazakhstan, AFP reported. Media said he was the fourth person to be charged in connection with the deal.
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(News report from Issue No. 224, published on March 25 2015)
MARCH 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A little known investigative reporting unit based in Bosnia released a report which said Gulnara Karimova, eldest daughter of Uzbek president Islam Karimov, may have earned as much as $1b from telecoms companies wanting to enter Uzbekistan. Ms Karimova is currently under house arrest in Tashkent.
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(News report from Issue No. 224, published on March 25 2015)
MARCH 6 2015 (The Bulletin) – A military court in Kazakhstan sentenced Nurlan Zholamanov, the former head of Kazakhstan’s border forces, to 11 years in prison for corruption. Zholamanov’s imprisonment is one of the biggest cases in the government’s high-profile anti-corruption drive.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 5 2015 (The Bulletin) – Two senior officials in the Tbilisi government, Reno Chakhava, head of the mayor’s office, and his deputy, Mariam Shelegia, have resigned over continued allegations of corruption and bribe-taking, media reported. The resignations throw the most powerful civic council in Georgia into disarray.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 6 2015 (The Bulletin) – At a Senate hearing in Astana, chairman of the ministry of finance’s revenue committee, Daulet Yergozhin, said the country was going to impose new measures against off-shoring cash.
This is important — if new legislation actually appears — as the issue of Kazakhstan’s wealthy getting their cash out of the country while poorer sections of the population suffer during an economic downturn could turn political.
A study published last month by Alexander Cooley and Jason Sharman, two academics, analysed the channels through which the Kazakh elite amassed “spectacular fortunes” in Western financial centres.
Mr Yergozhin wasn’t responding to these accusations. Instead he said Kazakhstan was working with Switzerland and Liechtenstein to reduce the flow of capital out of the country.
“Already this year, we are planning to put barriers against the movement of capital [to offshore locations] and we will start seeing the results of this policy early next year,” media quoted him as saying.
Kazakhstan has been looking was to bring capital back into the country. Last year it introduced an amnesty for people which repatriated cash. It has said that this amnesty has so far attracted $1b back into Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The French authorities have seized properties worth millions of euros belonging to Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbek president Islam Karimov, media reported. One of the properties was an estate near Paris which had its own opera house. Ms Karimova, once a potential presidential successor, is under house arrest in Tashkent.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Kazakhstan convicted the former head of the anti-monopoly commission, Murat Ospanov, of corruption and ordered him to pay a $6m fine. Government prosecutors had wanted an 11-year jail sentence. Kazakhstan has prosecuted several government officials in an aggressive anti-corruption campaign over the past year.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Georgian interior ministry said it arrested Jokia Bodokia, a senior official in the Tbilisi city government, for taking a bribe. PM Irakli Garibashvili has said that he wants to make wiping out corruption a priority. Opposition said he is using the purge to attack his enemies.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
JAN. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Global Fund, a Switzerland-based health organisation, said corrupt suppliers had swindled $5m from an HIV/AIDS awareness project in Kazakhstan. The corruption highlights the extent of the problems facing foreign companies and organisations in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015
