The Case of Viktor Khrapunov
The former major of Almaty considers that the Kazakh president is trying to manipulate Swiss media and justice. He proclaims his good faith in an interview with L’Agefi.
The Geneva prosecutor’s office has opened proceedings against your family for money laundering. The prosecutor, Jean-Bernard Schmid, is investigating the origin of funds invested in Switzerland…
I understand that Swiss authorities need to act upon an international request, even if it’s issued by a dictator like Nursultan Nazarbayev. I understand it but I lament it. The accusations uttered against me and my family are founded on motives of a political nature. After about two years, the pseudo-justice of Kazakhstan has decided to put together a file aimed at accusing me of money laundering and other crimes. I outright reject these accusations which are only aimed at discrediting me and shutting me up as a member of the opposition.
According to French-speaking Swiss TV, tens of millions have been frozen at Credit Suisse and Schroeder & Co. banks?
This information on French-speaking Swiss TV is fake. I’ve urged Swiss journalists and judges to treat information provided by the Kazakh regime with utmost caution. Fabrication and falsification of documents for political reasons, including documents of a judicial nature such as the one presented on French-speaking Swiss TV, are practically an everyday occurrence in Kazakhstan . I repeat, I don’t have and I’ve never had bank accounts abroad. Therefore, how could accounts belonging to me be seized? To avoid any further misunderstandings, I’ll specify once again that no amount has been frozen in accounts held by my family members at either of those two banks.
The document cited by RTS, in Russian, claims that your position as mayor allowed your wife to become rich: 70 plots of land and buildings belonging to the State were taken over, resulting in a profit of 250 million dollars.
These accusations are false. Nazarbayev has adopted Goebbels’ propaganda method. The bigger the lie, the easier it will be to make people believe it. And the bigger it is, the more it will stay in people’s minds. Everyone knows that the Kazakh regime doesn’t back away from any manipulation to corner its opponents. I’ve never gained any personal benefit from the positions I’ve occupied. I was Minister of Energy and Mines before becoming mayor of Almaty. However, contrary to the Nazarbayev clan, which has pillaged the country’s resources, I don’t own any power plants or mineral deposits. When Nazarbayev gave me orders asking me to transfer this or that property to one of his close ones, I always made him aware of my indignation. This is the reason why he drove me away of that ministry to place me at the head of the city of Almaty.
It’s been pointed out that the company KazReallncom, connected to your wife, was able to acquire a kindergarten for 336,934 francs in an auction, when it was privatized, thanks to your position as mayor. In 2003, she resold it for 13.4 million…
Regarding this lie, I’m also completely calm and I’m ready to collaborate to refute all the false accusations made against me and my family. This is a building that was acquired completely legally, in a public tender, without any privileges, within the framework of the privatization of dozens of child care centers that had been abandoned or where construction had never been completed. At the moment of purchase, it was in ruins. Following important investments, the building was completely renovated. It included classrooms, in compliance with the tender specifications established by the city. Leila also opened the first French-style bakery in Almaty and a sewing workshop there, creating 50 jobs.
In its ranking of the 300 largest fortunes in Switzerland last year, Bilan ascribed you 300 to 400 million and a villa in Cologny. Where did that money come from?
Rightly, Bilan took us off that list in its latest edition. My family does not belong in that ranking at all. I don’t have a chauffeur, nor a private plane, nor a yacht. The villa in Cologny was purchased by my daughter thanks to a mortgage. Today, my entire family lives there, including my wife’s parents, her sister, her husband, and her two young children. We also have an apartment in Geneva which is undergoing renovations. Those completely wild figures, published by that magazine for the last two years, have caused us a lot of harm. I fear that members of the Nazarbayev clan may have provided false information to the magazine. And, right now, Kazakh justice is using that as evidence.
How did your problems with the Kazakh president begin?
It was a series of circumstances which became worse with the marriage, in July 2007, of my son, Ilyias, to the daughter of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a member of the opposition exiled in London. When I personally went to the president to announce the news of the alliance that our children wanted to form, he was not pleased. Afterwards, Mukhtar Ablyazov was subjected to persecution and the president’s clan took over this assets. Nazarbayev is the king of corruption. He’s made a country that’s five time larger than France his private family company. Completely illegally, the clan has taken complete control of the petroleum and gas industries, as well as that of non-ferrous metals (copper, gold, etc.). He founded a company that he resold to Glencore and founded the company Kazak-Mys, which controls the entire non-ferrous metal industry. He controls a huge steel company in Termitau (the Karaganda steel Combine), resold to the Indian company Kashmi Mittal, in which he kept a share. He controls all electric and thermal power in Kazakhstan. He states that he wants to fight corruption but he fools no one. He’s got Parliament wrapped around his little finger. Being very docile, in 2010, it agreed to a law forbidding to ask the president to account for his actions. It’s legalized the cult of personality for Nursultan Nazarbayev. No one has the right to criticize him or to divulge information about the clan’s bank accounts. The penal code can be applied in these cases, up to the death penalty. Almost 99% of the media belong to him. He’s been proclaimed Leader of the Nation.
Did you expect this course of events when you left the country?
Yes, I wanted to cut all ties to this third-class circus. Kazakhs call Nazarbayev “our small deity”. I’m very hurt by this situation that affects a highly educated and cultivated people. I can’t understand how certain sectors of Kazakh society can be fooled so easily. Some of them have even entered into a sort of competition to determine who’s most flattering. He’s treated as a “great pacifier”, a man that has his “heart in his mind”. Two American congressmen even nominated him for the Nobel Peace prize for having saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe. I was born 200 km. away from the nuclear testing area in Kazakhstan and I’m well aware that he renounced nuclear weapons under the pressure of national opinion in 1991. Furthermore, Nazarbayev could’ve never kept the nuclear warheads that remained in his territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union, due to a simple reason: Kazakhstan didn’t meet any of the requirements for the complete manufacturing cycle of this type of weapons. Neither Russia nor the United States would’ve been able to help Kazakhstan, even if they wanted to, because this would’ve implied a breach of the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
You left Kazakhstan for Switzerland in 2007, for health reasons…
That was the only way I could leave the country. I have too much information about the illicit gains of the president’s clan. He had decided to eliminate all the witnesses to his errors. The president has no qualms about physically eliminating his opponents. In 2005, my predecessor as mayor of Almaty, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, was killed by three bullets. His wife found his body, pierced by two bullets next to his heart and one to he head. The official version talked about suicide! In 2006, another opponent was shot dead, along with his bodyguard and his chauffeur. Members of the security forces had taken them out of Almaty and shot them.
You thought this could happen to you…
Yes, I thought that.
Is your request for political asylum in Switzerland related to the proceedings filed in Geneva by Kazakh authorities for money laundering?
Within the framework of the asylum process, we sent three federal files to Bern with all this evidence, incriminating Nazarbayev. This request was filed in the summer of 2011, well before the Kazakh request for mutual legal assistance. The persecution of my parents in law was what triggered everything. Without any legal basis, they were forbidden from going on vacation to Turkey. Consequently, Leila’s father, who is 83 years old, suffered a stroke and had to be taken to Moscow for medical care. A medically-equipped airplane came to pick him up but the authorities didn’t let him on board. It was thanks to journalists who came to the airport and a doctor who stated that he could die at any minute that he was allowed to leave, after 6 hours of humiliation. My request for asylum concerns them, as well as Leila, her sister, and her husband. I don’t rule out that Kazakh authorities wanted to react to our asylum request with their request for mutual legal assistance.
We read that the opening of the investigation for money laundering against Timur Kulibayev, the Kazakh president’s son in law, was connected to an anonymous report from Mukthar Ablyazov, your daughter in law’s father. Can you confirm this?
I can’t affirm this because I first heard that an investigation was open in this matter from Swiss media. Among the documents included in the file, there are, namely, uncontestable bank transfers that demonstrate that Timur Kulibayev has plundered from the country’s funds. The media have also published information about money laundering by Nazarbayev, in Swiss banks, of 100 million dollars, stemming from the sale of the technical facilities and logistical means of the Khabar radio and television complex. This transaction was carried out through Saule Tlevlessova, someone they trust, an employee at OMPA, a university friend of Dariga’s, Nazarbayev’s eldest daughter and Rakhat Aliev’s ex-wife.
