The investigating authorities opened criminal cases against businessmen and entrepreneurs without any grounds. This statement was made by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Kazakhstan.
As noted in the department, over the past year, the investigating authorities conducted two thousand searches in the offices of entrepreneurs and seized the property of 60 businessmen.
“Entrepreneurs face the most severe pressure. During the investigation, arrests are made, searches, interrogations, and documentation are seized. Prosecutors found that certain investigative bodies widely practiced initiating cases against businesses based on the conclusions of paid specialists. Hundreds of entrepreneurs were involved in the criminal orbit. At the same time, their conclusions were not supported by sufficient data and were often refuted by forensic experts. Since 2021, about 1.5 thousand illegally initiated criminal cases have been terminated,” the Prosecutor General’s Office noted.
In this regard, according to the decree of the Prosecutor General, a detailed regulation on the registration of pre-trial investigations in relation to business entities was sent to the criminal prosecution authorities. In addition, they are now prohibited from registering any statements and messages of a civil law nature in the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigation.
“A fundamentally new requirement is a ban on registering a pre-trial investigation in relation to a business entity during the period of validity of the deadlines for appealing against acts of inspection, revision or audit. There is also a ban on investigating facts related to the receipt of profit by an entrepreneur as a result of savings, if this didn’t adversely affect the quality of the work. First of all, this concerns work on public procurement and tenders of quasi-state companies,” the Prosecutor General’s Office of Kazakhstan summarized.
