Tag Archives: Uzbekistan

Belgian and Uzbek Governments Profit from Termination of DoJ’s Kleptocracy Unit

Posted on by
1

Central Asia Due Diligence and the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights have identified the latest fallout from the Trump Administration’s destruction of American institutions devoted to fighting global corruption. The governments of Belgium and Uzbekistan have each pocketed $108 million in stolen assets that should have gone to the people of Uzbekistan.

In this just released paper, the two human rights NGOs explain how the demise of the Department of Justice’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative allowed the two governments to ignore provisions in the UN Convention Against Corruption and the principles of the Global Forum on Asset Recovery that together bar assets stolen by a corrupt official from being kept by the government of the country where the official stashed them or returned to the official’s corrupt cronies.

Lawyers for the Initiative had designed a sophisticated process (details here) to see the $216 million in bribes to former Uzbek first daughter Gulnara Karimova found in Belgian banks DoJ would go to the UN trust fund overseeing development programs in Uzbekistan. With the Initiative’s demise, the Belgian and Uzbek governments apparently saw no reason they should not divvy up the money between them.

So thanks to the Trump Administration, Belgium, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, is now $108 million wealthier, and Uzbek’s leaders, several Gulnara’s accomplices, now have $108 million to spend keeping themselves in power. Meanwhile, the citizens of Uzbekistan, GDP per capita $3,500, scrape by.

An Assessment of the Swiss Return of Stolen Assets to Uzbekistan

Posted on by
Reply

The return of assets stolen by corrupt means is “a fundamental principle” of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, and the Convention mandates that its now 191 state parties “afford one another the widest measure of cooperation and assistance” to ensure states victimized by corruption recover the proceeds of the crime wherever they are located (article 51).

Easy enough to state the principle. And easy enough to implement where the victim state’s leaders are democratically chosen, committed to advancing citizens’ well-being, and corruption is under control. But what if those conditions don’t hold? What if the same kleptocrats who stole the assets are still in power? Even if the crooks have been purged, so long as autocrats run the government, what guarantee is there that the assets won’t simply enrich the current powerholders? Or worse yet, fund measure to further repress their citizens?

As my friend and former Soros Foundation colleague Alisher Ilkhamov describes in the current issue of Central Asian Due Diligence (here), Switzerland is working through these issues as it begins to return to Uzbekistan the several hundred million dollars the former president’s daughter Gulnara Karimova stole. Uzbekistan’s government is a step above where it was when Gulnara set the record for shaking down foreign investors, but a budding democracy it is not. By a long shot.

Alisher describes the conditions Switzerland attached to the return of a first tranche of $131 million in 2022, how they were implemented, and how that experience should inform the recent agreement between Switzerland and Uzbekistan to return another $182 million. His assessment will be of value to policymakers everywhere wrestling with the return of stolen assets to states that fall far short of democratic, good governance norms.

Why Won’t Sweden Punish Swedes for Bribing Foreign Government Officials? UPDATE

Posted on by
2

Last week a Swedish appellate court issued an opinion confirming the anticorruption community’s worst fear. The decision stems from a 2017 U.S. prosecution of Swedish telecommunications giant Telia for bribing the Uzbekistan president’s daughter. The evidence showed Telia’s then CEO and two other executives countenanced the bribery, and Swedish prosecutors promptly charged the three with bribing a foreign official. To the surprise and shock of both prosecutors and observers, all three were acquitted at a 2019 trial (here).  

It was widely assumed the Stockholm Court of Appeals, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious appeals court, would reverse the trial court’s decision.  Instead, in a February 4th opinion it affirmed it.

UPDATE. Chief prosecutor Kim Andrews termed the decision “offensive,” telling OCCRP in a statement that the decision means “Swedish companies can jump queues” by bribing, that Sweden “is failing to live up to its international obligations, . . . and that we leave it up to other European countries and the United States to clean up our mess.”

Former South African MP Andrew Feinstein once asked a senior Swedish official about foreign bribery. His reply:

“All bribes are illegal but if a Swedish company paid bribes in another country, I can’t say we would do anything about it.”  

The Telia acquittal is the latest sign that this attitude continues to prevail. That the anticorruption community’s worst fear about Sweden is true. That to protect the export earnings of Swedish multinationals and to shield the Swedish elites who run them, the government will condone the bribery of foreign public officials no matter how egregious.  Indeed, the first and still most appalling example of the lengths Sweden will go to derail a foreign bribery investigation was in a case that implicated its now prime minister.

Continue reading →

A Covid-19 Checkup: How the IMF’s Transparency Measures Have Fared So Far

Posted on by
2

With a trillion dollars in lending capability, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is one of the best-equipped institutions to deal with the Covid-19 public health and financial crisis. Since March, the IMF has met an “unprecedented number of calls for emergency financing” with “unprecedented speed and magnitude,” through renegotiations of rapid credit facilities, refinancing initiatives, and debt relief assistance for more than 100 countries, totaling over $100 billion in disbursements so far. In the early days of the pandemic, there was a great deal of concern among anticorruption advocates over the way these emergency funds would be monitored (see collections of pieces here and here). The IMF’s initial approach generally did not impose formal transparency or governance requirements as a condition for receiving emergency Covid relief funds. Rather, the IMF chose to rely more on after-the-fact safeguards: recipient countries were told to spend as needed but to “keep the receipts.”

The IMF’s approach is understandable. As Jason Keene argued on this blog, the IMF at that early stage faced a trade-off between speed and transparency, and may have reasonably concluded that it would not be advisable to bargain over transparency measures if doing so would slow the deployment of much-needed funds. This conclusion, as a May 2020 IMF publication revealed, was influenced by the IMF’s experience with the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa: Many, including a prominent public health journal, blamed the IMF for the lethality of the Ebola epidemic, provoking a backlash against what was seen as unduly burdensome loans, a focus on austerity, and the underfunding of medical systems in vulnerable countries (see here, here, and here). Given this background, it’s understandable that the IMF might, on balance, favor speed over transparency, providing loans for Covid-related public health and budgetary shortfalls without much conditionality.

Continue Reading

Will the Swiss Condone Torture in the Rush to Return Assets to Uzbekistan?

Posted on by
4

Allegations of torture have dogged the planned return of stolen assets from Switzerland to Uzbekistan for years (here). In a recent interview, a cellmate of one of the alleged torture victims has given the claims new life.  And should give Swiss citizens and their government pause before proceeding with any return.

The assets to be returned are the several hundred million dollars in bribes paid to Gulnara Karimova for the grant of mobile phone licenses in Uzbekistan, something within her power as daughter of the country’s then president.  She stashed most of the money in Switzerland, and when the scheme was exposed, Swiss prosecutors promptly opened a money laundering case against Gulnara and her accomplices. From the outset, the Swiss government made it clear that, if and when defendants were found guilty, the laundered funds would be returned to Uzbekistan.

A breakthrough came in 2018 when Gayane Avakyan, one of Gulnara’s accomplices, signed a Swiss Summary Penalty Order confessing to her role in the money laundering scheme and giving up any claim to the laundered funds.  The order was signed while she was serving time in an Uzbekistan prison, and because of multiple, credible reports that torture is commonly practiced in Uzbek prisons, questions were immediately raised about whether torture or the threat of torture was used to get Avakyan to sign.  A prison cellmate now says she was in fact subjected to a particularly harsh form of torture while incarcerated. Continue reading →

Should a Kleptocrat Be Able to Bribe Her Way Out of Trouble?

Posted on by
2

Gulnara Karimova parlayed her position as daughter of Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet ruler into an international symbol of kleptocracy.  Reviled at home and abroad for vulgar excess, after her father’s death she was sentenced to a long prison term following a sham trial.  But most of the billion or so dollars she stole remains beyond the Uzbek government’s reach, tied up in complex litigation principally in Switzerland.

Now, as she recently revealed, she is in negotiations to hand back most of what she stole – in return for her release from one of Uzbekistan’s notorious prison colonies and the right to hang onto to perhaps as much as a hundred million for herself and the lawyers and fixers negotiating the deal. Uzbek citizens and activists are in arms over this blatant attempt by a posterchild for kleptocracy to bribe her way out of prison.  In an open letter, civil society activists call on the Swiss government, which would have to accede to this unseemly bargain, to repudiate it. They ask too that other government with claims over some of the assets, and thus possibly some say over the deal, to help kill it.

Allowing a kleptocrat to bribe her way out of jail sets a terrible precedent. Is it one the international community wants to see set?  Do Swiss citizens really want their government to be the one setting it? Why is the Swiss government in such a hurry to return dirty money to the Uzbek government?  Particularly in the face of opposition from representatives of the real victims of Karimova’s crimes, the citizens of Uzbekistan.

In their letter, the activists outline an alternative to a hasty return, one that would see Karimova held accountable in a real trial for her crimes and the stolen assets returned in ways that would advance the welfare of all Uzbeks. The English version of the letter here, the Russian one here, and the French one here.

Swedish Court’s Stunning Acquittal of ex-Telia Executives for Bribery

Posted on by
6

A Stockholm District Court’s acquittal of three former executives of Swedish telecom giant Telia of bribery shocked the global anticorruption community and has smirched Sweden’s reputation as a clean government champion (original decision; English translation).  Despite overwhelming evidence, the court refused to find the three guilty of paying Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the then president Uzbekistan, over $300 million in bribes for the right to operate in the country.

E-mails showed defendants directed the money to a Karimova shell company, hid their dealings with her from Telia’s board, and knew paying her violated American antibribery law. (Telia subsidiary’s Statement of Facts in the U.S. prosecution.)  Though defendants argued Karimova had no official role in telecom licensing, the evidence showed her father had given her de facto control of the telecom licensing agency.  Perhaps most damning, the court had the sworn statement Telia made in settling the FCPA case arising from the bribery. It there admitted “Executive A . . . a high-ranking executive of Telia who had authority over Telia’s Eurasian Business Area” and “certain Telia executives” had been the principals behind the bribery scheme (Statement of Facts,  ¶s 12, 17, 19, 26, 30, and 34).

The court defended its acquittal of Tero Kivisaari, apparently Telia “Executive A,” Lars Nyberg, CEO when the bribes were paid, and the lawyer who counseled them on two grounds. One, the prosecutor had not provided “hard evidence” of bribery, and two, even if he had, the law then in effect did not reach defendants’ conduct.

Google’s translation of the decision is rough (mutanklagelser, Swedish for bribery, is rendered as “manslaughter”) but not too rough to see through the court’s skewed findings of fact and flimsy legal reasoning. Continue reading →

Uzbekistan’s Own Donald Trump

Posted on by
3

Donald Trump owes much of his success as a real estate developer to an easy relationship with the anti-money laundering laws, and he continues to profit from his investments while President thanks to an even easier relationship with conflict of interest norms.  Reports out of Uzbekistan suggest Jahongir Artykhodjaev, mayor of the capital city Tashkent, has followed a Trumpian-like path to wealth and power.  Like Trump, Artykhodjaev has looked past how investors in his real estate projects came into their money; like Trump, while in public office he has steered government contracts to companies he owns, and like Trump, when called on his dual role as businessman and government officials, he claims to have distanced himself from his business empire upon taking office.

The main difference (besides hair color) between Trump and Artykhodjaev is that independent prosecutors are examining whether Trump broke rather than simply bent anti-money laundering and conflict of interest laws. By contrast, after accounts in the international press (here and here) exposed Artykhodjaev’s Trumpian proclivities, senior Uzbek officials called a press conference where they leapt to his defense, going so far as to deny there is any Uzbekistan law that Artykhodjaev could have broken. Continue reading →

Will the Swiss Government Heed Civil Society’s Advice When Returning Stolen Assets to Uzbekistan?

Posted on by
Reply

Readers of this blog know the Swiss government faces a dilemma in returning several hundred million Swiss francs of stolen assets to Uzbekistan (here and here).  Although the current government has taken small steps towards reform, it remains dominated by the same clique of Soviet-era apparatchiks whose corrupt ways were behind the theft of the assets. Returning the money thus runs a high risk that it will go right back to the culprits or their cronies.

At the same time, the Swiss government has an obligation under the UN Convention Against Corruption to return the assets. Moreover, thanks to decades of misrule, living condition for the average Uzbek remain dismal at best.  Money for everything from basic education and health programs to investment in public works is desparately needed.

Uzbek civil society now offers a solution to the Swiss dilemma.  Acknowledging the reformist leanings of the current government, and wanting to encourage them, civil society proposes that the Swiss government return the funds in tranches.  The return would be keyed to progress in realizing the kinds of reforms the government says it is committed to making.   Internationally recognized measures would be used to gauge progress.

A phased, conditioned return has two advantages.  It offers those in the Uzbek government leverage to persuade reluctant colleagues of the need for change.  At the same time, a phased return avoids swamping the government with a massive amount of money its primitive public financial system simply couldn’t manage responsibly.

The proposal appears in a letter to Swiss authorities authored by prominent Uzbek citizen, both those who have had to flee the country to escape political repression and those (anonymously) who remain.  The English version is here; a Russian version here.  A commentary on the proposal in the Swiss press is here, and background on the circumstance the led to the theft is here.

Will the Swiss Government Condone Gross Human Violations in Returning Stolen Assets to Uzbekistan?

Posted on by
Reply

The Swiss take pride in their nation’s uncompromising defense of human rights. Its diplomats offer unwavering support for the rights of the oppressed in international fora; its NGOs provide generous support to human rights defenders around the world, and as home to the United Nations Human Rights Council and other UN human rights agencies, Geneva is the center of the global discourse on human rights. But if recent press reports are to be believed (here [German] and here [English]), the Swiss government may be ready to ignore gross human rights violations perpetrated by the government of Uzbekistan.

The issue is part of the struggle over how to return the several hundred million dollars that Gulnara Karimova, daughter of its recently deceased dictator, stashed in Switzerland with the help of lackeys Gayane Avakyan and Rustam Madumarov. The monies are allegedly bribes international telecommunications companies paid Karimova to operate in Uzbekistan.

The Uzbek government is seeking their return while Uzbek civil society argues that because the government is so corrupt, the Swiss government should follow the precedent established in a Kazakh case and return the monies directly to the Uzbek people.  If the Swiss government does not, and does return the money to the Uzbek government, it will be forced to condone grave human rights abuses Avakyan and Madumarov have suffered at the hands of the Uzbek government. Continue reading →