Today, we are present you a new research project -
“Who Owns Kazakhstan. KLEPTOCRACY: Figures, Personae and Maps”
A limited information access and the non-transparency of governorship are common in authoritarian regimes. The people do not have valid information on who really owns the country’s natural resources, industries, large real estate properties. How have the owners obtain them? How legal were the selling transactions or privatisation schemes? On what are they spending the money received from the sale of the public property?
These questions are commonly left unanswered.
Meanwhile, the answers are crucial. For the land and resources should not be owned by those currently in power. And it is the state/budget money that finances these investment projects. However, the dividends from the use of the resources (including those in the form of bribes and kickbacks) are received by the selected few who then siphon them off the country and legalise them by, among other things, investing in luxurious real estate abroad.
As part of this project, we have already published for important stories. Each one is complemented with an interactive map. By clicking on the objects shown, the users can open related dossiers. (Of course, the lists of the names and the assets are not complete for we are just at the beginning of the research).
The first story features a short guidebook of the offshore real estate owned by individual Kazakhs. You will be surprised at the quantity of expensive houses and palaces belonging to the selected few.
The second story is devoted to the Kazakhmys empire that has usurped the entire copper extraction and production industry in the country. Do you know who its main client is? The Chinese economy, it turns out.
The third story tells the reader in whose hands Kazakhstan’s oil resources have been accumulated. It may sound incredible but, wherever one looks, one sees the Chinese CNPC’s “ears”.
The fourth story is about the owners of the large industries in Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar region (perhaps the most industrially advanced area in the country). The finale of the story is anything but boring – guess who’s got the tastiest morsels?
You can read ALL the four stories and see the related interactive maps here - http://klepto.asia.
See here about the PROJECT and the project team.
Unfortunately, the articles of the project are only in Russian.
