Tag Archives: corruption

Luxurious holidays for Kyrgyzstan’s police

CHOLPON ATA/Kyrgyzstan, JULY 29 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A sunny day had turned bad. Rain was sweeping down the valley warning of an impending storm. Just ahead of the storm, a sleek black 4×4 cruised out of the hills bordering Lake Issyk-Kul, the mountain-ringed glacial lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan.

“Do you need a ride?” asked the young Kyrgyz woman in the passenger seat.

Her driver pulled off towards Issyk-Kul, the large clear-blue lake which serves as a summer playground for Kyrgyzstan’s middle class and ruling elite.

The well-dressed lady in the passenger seat picked up the conversation.

“My driver took me to drink the first milk from a horse that’s just had a baby. It’s very good for the skin,” she said.” “I’m staying at Caprice. My husband’s in Bishkek. He’s in the financial police. He is, how do you say, a workaholic?”

Anti-corruption lobby groups accuse Kyrgyzstan’s police of being riddled with bribe-taking officials. Caprice, the hotel where this Kyrgyz lady was staying, lies near the town of Cholpon Ata on the northern shore of Lake Issyk Kul and is Kyrgyzstan’s most luxurious lakeside resort.

The hotel, the 4×4 and the pampered lifestyle spoke of wealth far beyond the reach of the average Kyrgyz civil servant. In a land of shady deals and rampant tax avoidance, a position in the country’s financial watchdog can be lucrative indeed.

ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)

Georgia’s UNM loses Tbilisi City Hall

JULY 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — It’s not over yet but Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has suffered a sharp fall in authority over the past nine months.

Lauded as the leader of the 2003 Rose Revolution that swept away the remains of the old Soviet power structures in Georgia, he has ceded authority across the country since his political party, United National Movement (UNM) lost a parliamentary election in October 2012.

The victors of the parliamentary election, Georgia’s richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his opposition coalition, have gradually taken increased control of local councils as UNM deputies switched sides.

Police have also detained dozens of UNM deputies and business leaders on corruption charges.

Now, Mr Ivanishvili’s supporters have wrenched Tbilisi City Hall from the UNM. On July 20, Georgian media reported that members of the city council had voted out the Tbilisi city council leader after his support gradually drained away in the preceding weeks.

Coming before a presidential election scheduled for Oct. 27, the loss of Tbilisi City Hall will be another blow to Mr Saakashvili’s authority. For foreign business in Georgia, the next few months will be increasingly turbulent.

ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)

Survey reveals police corruption in Kazakhstan

JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Kazakhstan have vowed to improve the reputation and effectiveness of the police. They have introduced fitness and aptitude tests and prosecuted various senior police officers for bribe taking.

According to a new survey by the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International (TI), though, they have a long way to go.

In TI’s annual Global Corruption Barometer, more than half of the Kazakh interviewees said they had a paid a bribe to the police in the past year.

Of course there were other services that also rated poorly for bribe taking, including so-called land services, medical services, the judiciary and education. In each case over a quarter of the respondents said they had paid a bribe but illegal payments to the police were noticeably worse.

Perhaps more worrying for the Kazakh authorities was the answer to the question on whether interviewees felt corruption had gotten worse or better over the past year. Nearly 35% answered that corruption in Kazakhstan had worsened in the past 12 months compared with 21% who said it had improved.

For their global corruption barometer, TI surveyed 1,000 people in each of 107 countries between September 2012 and March this year. The results are by no means definitive but, for Kazakhstan at least, they do make for an interesting, and important, snapshot.

ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)

Survey says corruption in Azerbaijan is waning

JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijanis, apparently, feel that the government is their best defence against corruption in the public sector.

In a new global corruption survey Transparency International asked roughly 1,000 people in Azerbaijan between September 2012 and March 2013 for their impression of official corruption.

The results were, broadly, positive. Of the interviewees, 41% said that corruption amongst officials was improving in Azerbaijan, 32% said it was roughly staying the same and 27% said it was getting worse.

Georgia, by contrast though, has been the region’s standard bearer for combating corruption and 70% of respondents in the Transparency International survey said that official corruption had decreased.

Back in Azerbaijan, nearly 60% of respondents thought corruption was a serious problem in the public sector but 70% also said government action was reasonably effective in dealing with this vice.

The institutions that respondents thought were most corrupt were the judiciary, medical services and the police. In each case over 40% of respondents thought these institutions were corrupt.

It may just be a snapshot but Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer of Azerbaijan provides an interesting psychological insight.

ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)

Gulnara quits role of Uzbek envoy

JULY 13 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, quit her role as Uzbekistan’s envoy to the UN in Geneva. Ms Karimova, who has been at the centre of business bribery allegations, said she wanted to concentrate on Uzbekistan, triggering speculation over her succession ambitions.

ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)

Political fragility in Georgia

JUNE 28 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Georgia arrested several more officials linked to the previous government of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s UNM party. UNM members have said the accusations of corruption are false. The row highlights political instability in Georgia.

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(News report from Issue No. 141, published on July 1 2013)

Kazakhstan updates its civil service

JULY 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Most of countries of the former Soviet Union are a byword for bureaucratic meddling, corruption and obfuscation.

Kazakhstan, though, is trying to change. And in a radical way. In June, the Kazakh government finished recruiting 940 civil servants for a special cadre of professional bureaucrats. The idea, first espoused in President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s state-of-the-nation address in December 2012, is to modernise the system.

This so-called A-class of civil servants had to pass an entry exam (2,204 applied for the positions, according to media) and they will receive training and coaching similar to their Western counterparts.

There is still a long way to go for Kazakhstan’s embryonic civil service reform and putting these lofty ideas into practice will be hard. Still, these are encouraging signs.

(News report from Issue No. 141, published on July 1 2013)

Tajikistan passes new anti-money laundering law

JUNE 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Perhaps responding to criticism, Tajikistan has introduced laws both strengthening legislation against money laundering and increasing punishments for people convicted of washing cash, media reported. Experts had said Tajikistan’s anti-money laundering legislation was one of the weakest in the world.

(News report from Issue No. 140, published on June 24 2013)

Former border guard chief tried in Kazakhstan

JUNE 14 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Almaty began the trial of Alim Khasenov, a former deputy head of Kazakhstan’s border guards service, for corruption, media reported. The case highlights endemic official corruption in Kazakhstan and problems at its border guards service. Mr Khasenov is charged with stealing $2m.

(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)

Kazakhstan continues hunt for opposition figures

JUNE 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — In their hunt for former billionaire banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, the Kazakh authorities haven’t had it all their own way.

Ablyazov is the former chairman of BTA Bank who fled Kazakhstan after the collapse of the bank, one of the country’s biggest, in 2009. The Kazakh authorities accuse him of embezzling billions of dollars, plotting a series of bomb attacks in Almaty and trying to topple the government. He is currently on the run.

Many of Ablyazov’s former associates have been arrested recently, including Yerlan Tatishev, a former BTA Bank director. In May, the Kazakh security services secured the extradition from Italy of Ablyazov’s wife and daughter.

Now though, they’ve suffered a setback. A judge in the Polish regional town of Lublin rejected a request from Kazakhstan to extradite Muratbek Ketebayev, an associate of Ablyazov. Polish police detained him on June 13. The judge freed him two days later.

Mr Ketebayev had been a Kazakh deputy economy minister before fleeing Kazakhstan to Poland. Like Ablyazov, the Kazakh authorities have accused him of trying to overthrow the government.

According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Polish prosecutor released Mr Ketebayev because he felt the extradition request was politically motivated.

(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)