MP Yerlan Sairov believes that relatives of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, Rakhat Aliyev and Kairat Satybaldy are involved in a business seizure. The parliamentarian demanded that the General Prosecutor’s Office return the property to the affected businessmen, Kursiv has reported. During a meeting of the Mazhilis, the deputy stated that representatives of the Old Kazakhstan, taking advantage of their impunity, had initiated a series of business takeovers. “Such a system was formed by Rakhat Aliyev (Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law) and his supporters,” Sairov stated.
Now, the victims have begun demanding the return of seized property. According to him, Nurlan Bimurzin and Megdat Kaliyev lost their oil business worth 170 million tenge ($369,000) in 2003. Zharkyn Kurentayev and Sholpan Karaneeva also “fell victim to the greed of the above-mentioned persons. The same group selected several vacation spots in the town of Konaev and the Altyn Bulak sanatorium in the Turkestan region,” Sairov specified.
Referring to the victims’ posts on social networks, Sairov said that a group linked to Nazarbayev’s nephew, Kairat Satybaldy, and his former sister-in-law, Gulmira, allegedly annexed the Hilton Hotel in Almaty and German citizen Robert Schumacher’s construction company. The latter is now considered bankrupt.
“The Prosecutor General’s Office needs to take steps to protect the economic interests of the victims from representatives of the Old Kazakhstan and return the property,” added Sairov.
Rakhat Aliyev, the husband of Dariga Nazarbayeva from 1983 to 2007, was one of the most influential people in Kazakhstan in the early 2000s. In 2007, he was charged with kidnapping and preparation for a coup d’état and sentenced in absentia to 40 years; Aliyev fled to Austria, where he was arrested in 2014, and found hanged in a cell in Vienna in 2015. The official cause of death was suicide.
In late February 2024, businessmen Bimurzin and Kaliyev announced that they had applied with the Prosecutor General’s Office to reclaim assets they claimed to have transferred under duress to the former president’s daughter, Aliya Nazarbayeva, in 2003. Nazarbayeva sued them for libel and lost
Furthermore, earlier this year, businesswoman Sholpan Karaneeva reported that the Hilton Hotel was taken by Kairat Satybaldy and his supporters in 2021. After the nephew of the former president was behind bars, the transfer of his assets to the state, among them the hotel, was initiated.
Kairat Satybaldy and his former wife, Gulmira Satybaldy, have been sentenced under articles on laundering money and the embezzlement of others property.
