The President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev denied through his press secretary Berik UALI the rumors that he has bank accounts in Switzerland.
“The head of state, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, doesn’t have Swiss bank accounts, which some media write about. The President doesn’t have accounts in foreign banks, offshore companies; he doesn’t have foreign real estate. The former wife of Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich never owned the accounts indicated in the publication. As for Timur Tokayev (President’s son), he is 38 years old, he is engaged in entrepreneurship, he has never worked in the public service,” the press secretary wrote on social networks.
He also noted that behind the spread of rumors are those who don’t like that the President “is vigorously working to limit the monopoly in the economy and politics, is implementing reforms” and therefore they are trying to discredit him.
It should be noted that the basis for the appearance of these rumors was the information disseminated by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The information was based on data obtained as a result of a leak about the bank accounts of the largest Swiss bank – Credit Suisse. Thanks to this leak, interesting details became known not only about the wealth of President Tokayev, but also about the assets of other equally famous personalities, such as the former President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian, the children of the head of the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic Vasif Talibov, King Abdullah II of Jordan and many other famous politicians and their relatives, as well as businessmen and entrepreneurs.
From Kazakhstan, the list includes Nadejda Tokayeva (ex-wife of the President), as well as Dariga Nazarbayeva (the eldest daughter of the first President Nursultan Nazarbayev) and his son-in-law Timur Kulibayev.
According to published data, Nadejda Tokayeva has 1,529,668 Swiss francs on her account.
“Very little is known about N. Tokayeva. As far as is known, she doesn’t have any business interests other than leasing real estate in Moscow. Her ex-husband has been a civil servant throughout his career, holding high positions such as foreign minister and prime minister during the period she had her account. He was also not publicly known as the owner of any business. Six months before closing the account, he became Director General of the UN office in Geneva. The couple’s son Timur Tokayev, who studied at an elite boarding school in Geneva, had a power of attorney for the account from the age of 14. As of January 2022, he had three apartments in that district,” Nadejda Tokayeva’s profile summary reads.
The profile of the current President’s family says that Tokayev’s son had one million dollars in a Swiss bank account back in 1998, when Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev worked as foreign minister, and “most Kazakhstanis lived in poverty”.
In addition, according to OCCRP, the family of Tokayev had secret offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands that controlled a British company with assets of $5 million. And they also bought apartments in the Lake Geneva region and in Moscow worth at least $7.7 million.
“The secrets of the Tokayevs go beyond Europe. Thanks to documents from the Pandora Archive, a hoard of offshore service provider files shared with OCCRP by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, reporters were able to find a trail that led them to the British Virgin Islands, a jurisdiction used by the wealthy people to keep their assets secret. In 2012, the year after the Tokayevs’ account with Credit Suisse was closed, the family set up two offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands: Wishing Well Group Inc, owned by Tokayev’s ex-wife, and Wisdom Invest & Finance Inc., which belonged to Timur. The only known activity of these firms seems to have been the ownership of a UK company, Edelweiss Resources LLP. The data also shows that each of these offshore companies had their own Swiss bank account. Since Edelweiss submitted only abridged financial statements, little is known about the activities of this company. But the latest report dated March 2014 shows that it had $4 million in cash in the bank and about $1 million in investments at the time. In the summer of that same 2014, the Tokayevs took another step to hide their investments deeper. The Cypriot registration agent, who handled their companies’ business, asked its office in the British Virgin Islands to appoint nominee shareholders or intermediaries as owners of the company, removing the Tokayevs from ownership, which would effectively hide their ownership. The request came by email; it was in the Pandora Archives. Since that time, all three companies of the Tokayevs have been closed,” the profile states.
As for real estate in Moscow, the authors of the investigation suggest that information about this was erased by the Russian government.
“Timur Tokayev lived in Moscow, driving around the Russian capital in Lexus and BMW with diplomatic plates and getting his degree at the Diplomatic Academy under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He and his mother also owned several expensive apartments in Moscow. Curiously, as investigation of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (who is now in prison) shows, the Russian government has erased all mentioning of them from the real estate register (Navalny’s team discovered the Tokayevs’ holdings in data downloaded before they could be removed from the registers). Since then, some of their properties have already been sold. The remaining real estate in Moscow includes a large apartment in the elite residential complex Fusion Park and another duplex apartment (two kilometers from the Kremlin). Tokayev’s wife was also registered in another apartment in the northeast of the city,” the President’s family profile notes.
It’s worth recalling that ACCA wrote about the family business of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev when it wasn’t mainstream. Most of the information, that we published before, was confirmed in the OCCRP’s report. In addition, the investigators once again confirmed ACCA’s conclusion that “information about the family of Tokayev was thoroughly cleaned up”.
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