Louis Freeh, former director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), will speak at a hearing of the Almaty Oblast Court on August 23 on the case to review the early release of businessman Muratkhan Tokmadi, who in 2018 was sentenced to ten and a half years for the 2004 murder of the BTA Bank chair, Yerzhan Tatishev. On August 9, it was ruled that Tokmadi should be released on parole after serving six and a half years.
In 2017, Freeh led a team of U.S. investigators and forensic experts who were brought in by the Tatishev family to look into the death of Yerzhan Tatishev, one of the founders and co-owners of what was at the time Kazakhstan’s largest bank. On the morning of the 23rd, Freeh, who served as a U.S. district judge before becoming the fifth director of the FBI, leading the agency from September 1993 to June 2001, shared details of his investigation with the media in Kazakhstan.
“In 2018, Murakhan Tokmadi admitted that he killed Tatishev and said that he did it because Mukhtar Ablyazov promised to pay four million dollars. Ablyazov’s goal was to gain control of BTA Bank,” Freeh told reporters. “His accidental shooting is impossible… The gun didn’t go off by itself.”
The probe and the findings of investigative firm Freeh Group International Solutions (FGIS), part of the law firm Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan LLP (FSS), since acquired by Alix Partners LLP, formed the basis of the original indictment against Tokmadi, after FSS and FGIS staff accessed documents which proved the banker’s death was willful.
The court hearing into Tokmadi’s parole was initiated by the family of the deceased.
On December 19, 2004, Yerzhan Tatishev died on a hunting trip whilst driving an SUV in the Zhambyl Region. At the car’s wheel pursuing prey across the steppe, Tatishev handed a 12-gauge shotgun to Tokmadi, who was sitting beside him. According to the defense, the SUV suddenly hit a bump, and the gun fired accidentally, with Tatishev receiving a gunshot wound to the head, the bullet passing through his left eye. At the time, the killing was ruled to be an “accident,” with Tokmadi sentenced to one and a half years for manslaughter. One of the witnesses to the incident was the banker’s security guard, Sergei Kozlikin, who swiftly fled Kazakhstan, saying he feared for his life.
In 2017, the case was reopened, and Tokmadi was charged with extortion and the illegal possession of firearms. In his 2018 testimony, Tokmadi stated that he was fulfilling an order from fugitive oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov, who was the co-owner of BTA Bank at the time. “Each time I met [Ablyazov] he argued that Yerzhan could not at any instant keep or sustain his word,” Tokmadi testified. “He proposed to deal with the problem through the physical elimination of Yerzhan. This would happen during a hunting trip and look like an accidental death. And so it happened.”
Some of the documents relating to the investigation – which was supervised by the National Security Committee (KNB) – were classified as “top secret.” Given that Tokmadi had attempted to escape from detention in a regional hospital prior to his trial, the former head of the KNB, Nartai Dutbayev, was questioned in the case. Tokmadi was promptly detained in the city of Taraz and taken to the pre-trial detention center of the Zhambyl Oblast Department of Internal Affairs.
In 2022, having retracted his previous testimony against Ablyazov, in a letter Tokmadi called on President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to reconsider his case. Tokmadi claimed that he was tortured into confessing by being injected with psychotropic drugs and kept in solitary confinement by KNB employees, who were seeking Ablyazov’s extradition from France. The majority of the national security officials listed in Tokmadi’s letter have since been convicted of the attempted coup d’état in January 2022.
Fifteen years since he fled from the authorities in Kazakhstan, the plethora of international court cases involving Mukhtar Ablyazov continue to rumble on. In November 2018, Ablyazov was convicted in absentia in Kazakhstan for ordering the murder of Tatishev. Ablyazov has judgments against him totaling more than $4.4 billion in the British courts alone, from where he took flight in 2012 to avoid three concurrent 22-month sentences for a “remarkable and brazen” contempt of court. In the latest of numerous judgments against him in the U.S., in June of this year a New York court found associates acting on behalf of Ablyazov – who stands accused of having embezzled up to $10 billion – guilty on claims of conversion and unjust enrichment.
