Éilliú, calaois, agus cás aisteach Zhanara Akhmetova

A conference at the Press Club, Brussels, this week heard a story of theft and corruption that, were it not for the serious harm caused to the victims, could almost be considered funny.

What appears at first glance to be a simple case of financial fraud, perpetrated against a number of banks and private citizens in Kazakhstan, becomes far more complex when the perpetrator herself is, with the help of a highly controversial and largely discredited “human-rights NGO”, reinvented not as a crook, but as a politically persecuted pro-democracy opposition politician.

The story, described at the conference as 'The curious case of Zhanara Akhmetova' relies for its credibility on the audience accepting as fact the argument that the lady at the centre of this case was persecuted and convicted by the Kazakh courts in 2009 for political activities she was to undertake only in 2017.

Zhanara Akhmetova’s modus operandi, the conference heard, was to borrow significant sums of money from individuals and banks for investing in property. There is no evidence that any monies were ever returned, and having received a seven-year prison sentence, the conference heard from one of her victims that she did not appeal the conviction.

Her sentence was deferred as she had a young son, and therefore her punishment would begin only when he reached the age of 14 years. However, as the time approached she was to flee the country and currently resides in Kyiv where she has again reinvented herself as a journalist and blogger.

In the meantime she has allied herself with the man described by the British press as “the world’s richest fraudster”, Mukhtar Ablyazov, a man with multiple convictions and outstanding arrest warrants in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. The British courts would also like to have a word with him, as he still has a two-year prison sentence to serve in that country.

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Ablyazov also presents himself as a persecuted oppositionist, ignoring the fact that he also fled his home country having embezzled as much as $7.6 billion during his time at the head of the country’s BTA Bank, then Kazakhstan’s largest financial institution.

He is the leader of a political party, albeit one that appears to exist only on Facebook: the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan.

Zhanara Akhmetova is also a member of this party, which is her vehicle for the political activities she began in 2017, and for which she had already been “persecuted” back in 2009. If it were not for the economic damage inflicted on her victims, of whom there are at least 15, it would almost be funny.

Ablyazov and Akhmetova have something else in common: both have their interests represented in the institutions of the European Union and beyond by the Warsaw/Brussels based human rights NGO Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF).

In fact, ODF represents the interests of numerous “politically persecuted oppositionists”, most of whom appear to have attracted multiple criminal convictions for fraud in an impressive number of different countries, at least three continents.

Take for example Viktor Khrapunov, a former mayor of Almaty and convicted fraudster who now styles himself as “democratic Khrapunov”, and who, from the safety of his home in Geneva, rails against the land of his birth and his convictions. Also in Geneva is Khrapunov’s son, Ilyas, who just happens to be married to Mukhtar Ablyazov’s daughter. Both father and son have been implicated in the laundering of Ablyazov’s ill-gotten gains in the United States.

ODF, which has itself been associated with money-laundering in the UK, has taken up Akhmetova’s case, and has persuaded a small group of Members of the European Parliament to write to Ukraine’s President Zelensky and other leading political figures asking for Akhmetova to be granted political asylum. Her case has been considered twice in Kyiv, and after full judicial process has been rejected.

This story has its comic credentials reinforced by the fact that one of the MEPs taking up the case with Kyiv is Patrick Lars Berg, a member of Germany’s allegedly neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Earlier this week Jörg Müller, the head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency stated that there is "sufficiently important evidence" to indicate that elements within the AfD were "striving against the free democratic order”, something that the Ukrainians should take into account considering that a representative of this extremist party is supporting Akhmetov’s political credentials. It also tells something about ODF’s choice of company.

The European Parliament might also consider the fact that a dubious organisation with murky criminal connections is permitted to stalk the corridors of power, and to manipulate its members into giving credibility to its seemingly nefarious projects. It might also consider the effect such interference might have on its relationship with the EU’s important strategic and economic partners, with whose internal affairs they are meddling.

Urgent case Akhmetova letter.pdf

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