Tag Archives: corruption

Azerbaijan tries to bribe Council of Europe

APRIL 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan has tried to bribe members of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (Pace) into helping it improve its human rights record, the Guardian newspaper reported citing various officials it had interviewed. Similar claims have been made before against individual members of the Council of Europe which has influence over the human rights lobby.

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(News report from Issue No. 325, published on April 17 2017)

Sweden’s Telia scraps deal to sell Tajik mobile network

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DUSHANBE, MARCH 31 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Telia, the Swedish telecoms company, accused Tajikistan’s government of effectively blocking the $39m sale of mobile unit Tcell to the Aga Khan, an accusation that will undermine Western business confidence in the country.

The Tajik government’s anti- monopoly agency failed to respond to a request to approve the Tcell deal before a deadline set by Telia, forcing it to void the sale of its 60% stake in the company to the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED).

In a statement, Emil Nilsson, head of the Eurasia region for Telia, said that the company had now written off the value of Tcell’s assets, which it put at $13m, although it was still looking for an alternative buyer.

“We have taken all relevant actions in trying to close the deal. The proposed buyer of our interest in Tcell, AKFED, is an established investor in the region with multiple companies in its current portfolio and a long history in Tcell,” he said. “We are now assessing alternative ownership solutions for Tcell.”

Neither the Tajik government nor the Aga Khan have commented.

Telia has been looking to sell its units in Central Asia and the South Caucasus after a corruption probe in 2012/3 discovered it had paid a bribe of several hundred million dollars five years earlier to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan’s then president Islam Karimov, in exchange for market access. Karimov died last year and Ms Karimova has been under house arrest in Tashkent since 2014.

The corruption scandal tarnished Telia’s reputation in the region. Netherlands-based MTS and Norway’s Telenor were also mired in the bribe-paying controversy.

Afterwards, in a damming indictment for companies operating in the region, Telia said the business environment in Central Asia was too riddled through with corruption that reputational damage was inevitable. It was better, the company had concluded, to sell its stakes in Tcell, Kcell (Kazakhstan), Ucell (Uzbekistan), Azercell (Azerbaijan) and Geocell (Georgia) than to risk more reputational damage.

The Aga Khan already owned a 40% stake in Tcell and had agreed to buy Telia’s stake in September last year.

In January, though, Telia accused the Tajik government of trying to pressure it into paying an unmerited tax bill and in February it said it had asked the anti-monopoly unit for a meeting to discuss why it hadn’t yet approved the deal with the Aga Khan.

A Conway Bulletin correspondent in Dushanbe confirmed that the Tcell network was operating as normal.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Georgian court jails Ex-MP for property Ponzi scam

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TBILISI, APRIL 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi sent the high-profile sisters Maia Rcheulishvili and Rusudan Kervalishvili to four years in prison for embezzlement linked to their construction company Center Point Group.

In a court case that gripped Georgia, the once glamorous sisters who had it all were told they had swindled 6,200 families out of $14m by promising them that they would build the homes of their dreams.

Instead many investors got nothing.

After the judgement, though, there was outrage from some families who said the sisters had gotten off lightly and that the real amount they had embezzled in an elaborate Ponzi scheme was far greater. In 2012, Transparency International, the anti- corruption lobby group, produced a report which said they had stolen $310m.

The judge said that the scam ran from 1999, when the Center Point Group was established, until it went bankrupt in 2008. Its assets were then moved to a company called Dexus in a deal in 2010 that observers have described as murky.

Center Point Group was notorious for collecting large advance payments from clients on promises to build luxury apartments. Hundreds said they never received their apartments.

For Ms Kervalishvili, prison represents a sharp fall from grace. She was once regarded as one of the richest and most successful businesswomen in the country. She had been an MP for former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement party and Parliament’s deputy speaker in 2008-12.

M Rcheulishvili’s husband is Vakhtang Rcheulishvili who was the former head of the Georgian Socialist party and a deputy speaker of Parliament in the 1990s and 2000s.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

US Senators want Trump Azerbaijan deal probe

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MARCH 30 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — US Senators asked for an official investigation into a hotel deal US President Donald Trump made in Azerbaijan which they suspect may have exposed him, indirectly, to illegal contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The deal, made before Mr Trump became US President earlier this year, involved Anar Mammadov, son of Ziya Mammadov. Ziya Mammadov used to be Azerbaijan’s transport minister and one of the most powerful people in the country. He had a reputation, though, for corruption and also for being linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

As well as possibly being tarnished by association with corruption allegations linked to the Mammadovs, Mr Trump may also have indirectly exposed himself to dealing with the Iran Revolutionary Guard, an organisation still covered by US sanctions. The Senators requested the investigation via the Senate’s Foreign Relations, Banking, and Judiciary committees which then sent on the request to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and FBI director, James Comey. They have yet to respond.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Prosecutors look at ING role in Uzbekistan telecom bribes

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MARCH 22 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — ING, one of the Netherlands’ biggest bank, became the second international bank to be placed under investigation over alleged links to money laundering by the Uzbek government.

Earlier this year prosecutors in Switzerland said that they had started an investigation into the role played by Lombard Odier, a Geneva-based private bank, in a series of bribes paid by European telecoms firms for access to Uzbekistan’s potentially lucrative mobile market.

In a statement, the Dutch prosecution service said: “The bank [ING] is suspected of having failed to report, or report in a timely fashion, irregular transactions. It is suspected of having enabled international corruption and money laundering.”

A spokesman for ING said that the company couldn’t make specific comments about an ongoing investigation other than to say that it was cooperating with the authorities.

Media reports said that the investigation will focus on a $184m payment made in 2007/8 by Netherlands-based Vimpelcom via ING to a Gibraltar-registered company owned by an associate of Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of former Uzbek president Islam Karimov. This was allegedly part of a larger bribe that Vimpelcom has already admitted paying to the Karimovs, then the unrivalled First Family of Uzbekistan, for access to the 35m-person market. Last year Vimpelcom paid a $795m fine for the bribe, the second largest fine for corruption in Western corporate history.

The discovery in 2012 by Western media of the bribes has already destroyed the careers of high-flying telecoms executives and persuaded both Sweden’s Telia and Norway’s Telenor to sell out of the Central Asia/South Caucasus market, which they have said they believe is riddled through with corruption.

It was also part of the undoing of the Karimovs’ grip on power in Uzbekistan.

Ms Karimova, had appeared set on succeeding her father as Uzbekistan’s president. She had styled herself as a glamorous multi-talented pop-singer, fashion-designer, captain-of-industry and Uzbek ambassador to the UN but her enemies swooped when the scale of her corruption became apparent.

Already unpopular in Uzbekistan, she was placed under house arrest in 2014 when she return to Tashkent and has barely been seen or heard of since. Her associates were arrested and convicted of various financial crimes.

When her father died in September, Ms Karimova was even prevented from attending his funeral in Samarkand.

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(News report from Issue No. 322, published on March 27 2017)

Swedish officials arrest Russian over corruption in Azerbaijan

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MARCH 14 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in Sweden arrested a Russian national working for the Canadian company Bombardier for allegedly paying bribes in Azerbaijan to win contracts, media reported. The bribery allegations date back to 2013 and focus on contracts to sell train signalling equipment to the Azerbaijani railway company. Azerbaijan has a poor record for corruption.

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(News report from Issue No. 321, published on March 20 2017)

Putin persuaded me into exile, says former Kyrgyz president

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MARCH 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Belarusian service, former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev said that Vladimir Putin — then Russian PM, now its president — had telephoned him during a revolution in 2010 to persuade him to flee into exile in Belarus. Kyrgyzstan wants to extradite Mr Bakiyev, who now lives permanently in Belarus, to face various corruption charges.

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(News report from Issue No. 320, published on March 13 2017)

Tajik police investigates Dushanbe ex-mayor

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MARCH 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in Tajikistan are investigating the former mayor of Dushanbe, Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev, for corruption linked to the construction of a shopping centre, media reported. Mr Ubaidulloev had served as the mayor of Dushanbe for 20 years before, surprisingly, resigning in January. He was replaced by Rustam Emomali, the son of Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon. Analysts have said that before he quit as mayor of Dushanbe, Mr Ubaidulloev was considered the ultimate elite insider and that the corruption allegations are part of a power struggle.

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(News report from Issue No. 320, published on March 13 2017)

Trump’s problematic Azerbaijan hotel deal

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MARCH 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> So what has Donald Trump, President of the United States, been doing in Azerbaijan?

>> Trump’s deals with Azerbaijanis have been getting him in trouble. Do you remember the dossier that a former British spy compiled on him last year, during the US presidential election? So incriminating were some of his discoveries about Trump’s alleged dealings with Russia and his potential for being blackmailed that the spy handed over the dossier to the US intelligence services. At the heart of these allegations was a visit that Trump made to Moscow in 2013 during the Miss Universe contest that he owns. There were some lewd allegations from that trip, too lewd to repeat in this family newspaper, but, and this is the point, the trip was set up by an Azerbaijani businessman, Araz Agalarov, with strong links in Russia.

>> Okay, but now I hear that there has been hotel project in Baku which is linked to Trump.

>> Yes, this is a different issue. Trump agreed to lend his brand to a hotel in a Baku suburb in 2012. This was before the US election and during a boom time for the Azerbaijani economy. It was a good place to invest. His daughter Ivanka visited the Tower in 2014 to make sure that the work was going to plan. While she was there, she also met with Trump’s Azerbaijani business partners, and this is where the trouble now lies for Trump. He either picked his business partners carelessly or, worse, was in some way complicit in various dodgy deals.

>> What do you mean? Who were his business partners for this Baku project?

>> Trump’s main business partner was Elton Mammadov, brother of Azerbaijan’s former powerful transport minister Ziya Mammadov who has various businesses, including in the hotel sector. The problem for Trump is that these businesses are alleged to be linked to corruption and also to dealings with Iran’s Republican Guard. This is illegal for Americans under US sanctions. Trump has vigorously denied any links to corruption or doing business with Iran.

>> What has Trump and his team done about this?

>> Before Christmas, Trump quietly cut his links to the unopened Baku hotel and last month, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev sacked Ziya Mammadov as transport minister, although it is unclear if this was connected to the Baku hotel deal.

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(News report from Issue No. 320, published on March 13 2017)

Kazakh police arrests another official

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MARCH 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in Kazakhstan arrested Bazarbai Nurabaev, chairman of the Committee for Geology and subsoil use within the ministry of investment and development, the latest high profile government official to be detained for corruption. The anti- corruption agency said that Mr Nurabaev and his deputies had been extorting bribes from several companies in return for licences.

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(News report from Issue No. 320, published on March 13 2017)