Kazakhstan: President was accused of trying to legalize corruption of officials
The citizens of Kazakhstan accused the country’s President, Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, of seeking to legalize corruption among officials. Such conclusions are contained in an open appeal addressed to the head of state.
The reason for the appeal was the words of President Tokayev, said by him on June 23 at the meeting concerning the elections of rural mayors. Then Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev said that officials shouldn’t be punished if they committed a crime by mistake.
“If a civil servant made a mistake when making a decision, while not pursuing malicious intent to steal budget funds or illegally enrich himself/herself by means of bribe, he/she shouldn’t be prosecuted. Otherwise, we’ll paralyze the state apparatus. The orbit of criminal prosecution should involve officials who deliberately committed corruption crimes. The anti-corruption service should do its job reasonably and not prosecute civil servants if they made a mistake without malicious intent,” the President explained.
This statement caused a flurry of indignation among Kazakhstanis, as people believed that the head of state in his own words actually legalized corrupt officials. After all, now any official, caught taking a bribe or stealing money from the budget, can say that he/she was mistaken and didn’t pursue malicious intent.
“How to assess your ambiguous statement?! Because you, Kassym-Zhomart Kemelevich, in fact, openly legalized corruption, that’s why our society exploded with righteous anger. We haven’t forgotten the outrage when your predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, organized the legalization of “dirty” money a few years ago! We can feel consistency in the policy of the authorities: first, they legalized “dirty” money, and then – corruption! There is a feeling that a secret intrigue is being carried out on the Olympus of the authorities, which is leading to the collapse of Kazakhstan,” indignant citizens write in an open appeal to the President.
According to the authors of the letter, the first President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev (who now heads the country’s Security Council), during his rule, gave birth to an army of greedy oligarchs, allowing them to privatize almost the entire country. And these oligarchs actually rule the country, and the state apparatus only creates the appearance of control, since it’s completely paralyzed. In addition, the authors of the appeal openly wrote that Tokayev is a dependent President, subordinate directly to the first President Nazarbayev and actually executing his will.
“This appeal is entirely devoted to one burning topic – your decision to legalize corruption of civil servants. We ask you to carefully study our arguments about disagreement with your decision, as well as analyze the information provided about the abuses of your elite in all spheres of its activities, which led to the paralysis of Kazakhstan. Please, explain the reasons for your decision and provide answers to all our questions. If our request is ignored, we reserve the right to consider our fears about the destruction of Kazakhstan to be true. We anticipate that due to the lack of truthful information, we have the right to use such a conclusion as evidence of the violation of our rights by the authorities, which have legalized the corruption of the state apparatus,” the letter says.
In addition, the authors of the letter draw attention to the fact that this is the 218th appeal to the head of state and that the previous 217 appeals remained unanswered.
