Kazakhstan aims to recover illegally acquired assets

Kazakhstan is putting legal instruments in place to recover illegally acquired assets, including assets abroad, two high-level officials told EURACTIV, adding that not all EU countries are cooperating.

Snezhanna Imasheva, Chairman of the Committee on Legislation and Judicial and Legal Reform of the Majilis (lower chamber) of the Parliament of Kazakhstan, mentioned the policy on Thursday (25 May) at a conference on constitutional reform in Kazakhstan, held in the European Parliament.

She said that over the last 30 years, people with political influence, some of whom were family members of the first president Nursultan Nazarbayev and high-ranking politicians from his entourage, amassed wealth at the expense of Kazakhstan’s resources.

She said that Kazakhstan had adopted special legislation to return it to the state.

EURACTIV spoke to Imasheva and Elvira Azimova, who, from 1 January this year, served as Chair of Kazakhstan’s Constitutional Court.

Azimova argued that an essential part of the reforms initiated by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev after the January 2022 events aim to answer people’s calls for more justice.

“As for the assets the embezzling and export abroad of which has been proven in court, their return should be decided by the agreements Kazakhstan has concluded”, she said.

Imasheva explained that the issue was complicated because people in high positions sometimes amassed wealth legally, although in an unfair way, thanks to their high places and connections. Moreover, this wealth has been hidden abroad in various funds and offshore firms.

“According to experts, assets of around $160 billion have been taken abroad”, she said.

The Mazhilis received on Wednesday a draft law regulating the procedure and outlining the creation of a particular state fund and a management company in charge of collecting and managing the returned assets, Imasheva said.

It was earlier reported that even before adopting special legislation, Kazakhstan succeeded in returning over $1.7 billion in illegally withdrawn assets and that the money recovered would be used to finance social and economic projects.

A new procedure was introduced, allowing an investigated person, based on publicly available information, gathered from NGOs or journalistic investigations about illegally acquired assets, to voluntarily submit information about his income and voluntarily return assets, avoiding court.

But work is still outstanding.

“We need a legal framework for this out-of-court mechanism”, Imasheva, who chairs the parliamentary committee for legal reform.

Returning assets from abroad was even more complicated, Azimova explained.

“The return of assets from abroad is a highly complex process and could not work if Kazakhstan doesn’t have an agreement with the respective country.

“There is also the issue of the political will of foreign countries. Establishing legal cooperation in criminal cases with EU countries has taken a very long time”, she said.

In her words, it’s mostly the countries of Eastern Europe which concluded such agreements with Kazakhstan, “but there were countries in Western Europe with which we haven’t yet concluded such agreements.”

The most prominent fugitive from Kazakhstan, Mukhtar Ablyazov, accused of embezzling $6 billion from the BTA Bank while serving as chairman, lives in France, one of the countries without a legal aid agreement with Kazakhstan.

The Kazakh press has reported, quoting the spokesman for the Inter-Agency Asset Recovery Commission, that assets were returned from Liechtenstein, Austria, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.

The spokesperson also said that the prosecutors were able to find and return from abroad gold jewellery worth tens of millions of dollars in connection with the case of Kairat Satybaldy, the convicted nephew of the first president of Kazakhstan.

Satybaldy received six years in prison for embezzlement on an especially large scale in Kazakhstelecom JSC and CTS JSC. He was also deprived of the right to hold positions in the civil service and national companies for 10 years.

[Edited by Alice Taylor]

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