Kyrgyzstan's bank of scandals

The Keremet Bank, the country's main financial institution, has been sold to bankers from Kazakhstan, with a total turnover of management staff, many members of which have been arrested on charges that have yet to be clarified. According to many sources, it laundered illegal money from the family of Kurmanbek Bakiev, president of Kyrgyzstan from 2005 to 2010.New buyers shrouded in mystery.

Biškek (AsiaNews) - The complex affair of Kyrgyzstan's Keremet Bank, heir to the Rosinbank that had been incorporated into the Kyrgyz Republic's National Bank since 2018, has ended with an unexpected privatisation.

It is the country's largest financial institution, with a well-developed regional network and a variety of infrastructures for services to different market sectors. The bank has always presented itself as the most ‘international’ in Kyrgyzstan, with a very flexible pricing policy and advanced customer relations systems.

Now Keremet has been sold to bankers from Kazakhstan, with a total turnover of management staff, several members of which have ended up under arrest on charges that have yet to be clarified.

A new board of directors was installed, which appointed a well-known Kazakh manager, Tatiana Kuržej, as director, together with the president Natalia Družinina. The Ministry of Finance in Biškek, which had been entrusted with the bank last March, made no official statement.

On 2 August, according to information from the Ministry of Justice, the bank had then gone through the procedure of a new registration, about which there is also no detailed information.

Only a few hints appeared in the media about the sale of the bank to foreigners; the AkiPress agency reported that 75 per cent of the authorised capital had been sold to a Luxembourg company. On the other hand, a deputy from Žogorku Keneš, Dastan Bekešev, had posted to his social media that the bank had been sold to the Russians.

According to reports published in the last few days, the bank was sold to the Kazakhs for 850 million som (about 10 million euro), a lower sum than the Kyrgyz government had paid to take it over in the previous months. There is also no confirmation on this information from the Ministry of Finance.

Tatiana Kuržej comes from Kazakhstan's ‘Eurasian Bank’, where she was deputy director, and Natalia Družinina was herself deputy president of the same institution, whose main shareholder is the Almaty-based ‘Eurasian Finance Company’, which, according to its official website, belongs to several Kazakh billionaires: Aleksandr Maškevič, Patokh Šodiev and Mukadaskhan Ibragimova, widow of the late Aližan Ibragimov. Another new member of the bank's management board, Klara Ermakbaeva, previously held the position of director of Kazakhstan's Bank Tsentr Kredit.

The Kyrgyz expert on financial investments, Šumkarbek Adilbek Uulu, commented on these upheavals stating that ‘it is difficult to understand the steps taken only by the figures appointed at the top of the structure, in the world of business it is not difficult to keep the real beneficiaries of transactions hidden, passing through offshoreroutes’.

The story of Keremet is also linked to that of the Asia Universal Bank owned by Maksim Bakiev, son of Kurmanbek Bakiev, president of Kyrgyzstan from 2005 to 2010, the year of the revolution that clouded the country's political life for years. According to many sources, the Bakiev bank cleaned up a lot of the family's illegal money and then turned into Zalkar Bank, Rosinbank and finally Keremet, receiving 8 billion som (about 85 million euro) from the state budget.

Investigations later declared these funds missing as well, arresting several executives, and the bank was forced to declare bankruptcy. However, the proceedings were not brought to a conclusion by the Prosecutor General's Office, and after a series of ‘secret’ meetings it was finally handed over to the Kazakhs, behind whom it is unclear who is actually hiding, and where the Kyrgyz people's much money has gone.

• Kyrgyzstan
• banking
• finance
• Keremet