Uzbekistan: an official was detained in Tashkent for a bribe

The press service of the Prosecutor General’s office of Uzbekistan announced the initiation of a criminal case for a bribe against the deputy head of Yunusabad district of Tashkent, Erkin Zokhidov.

The operation to expose the bribe taker went through a well-established scheme, when $ 5000 was handed over to him for recognizing ownership of an unauthorized building. According to ACCA’s source, earlier E. Zokhidov and the bribe giver had influential mutual acquaintances, which served as a guarantee of a wrongful transaction.

According to the source, the official was supposed to vacate the post of vice mayor for capital construction, utilities, public amenities, industry and entrepreneurship. Under his guardianship was a prestigious district of Tashkent, where wealthy citizens of the country prefer to live.

“There is some kind of personnel cleaning, the purpose of which is possibly to change the mayor of Tashkent, Jahongir Artykhodzhaev and his trusted people,” a source of ACCA claims.

An indirect evidence of the campaign of repressive cleaning of staff is a recent information from the little-known publication Jahon.uz with almost zero Internet activity on social networks. Sensational news about the criminal case against the head of the expedition of the General department of the Presidential Administration of Uzbekistan Asatulla Dustov was spread and picked up by other publications. The Jahon.uz report cites materials from the criminal case on the creation of a criminal group that “acted on an ongoing basis, had a hierarchical organizational structure, and a complex conspiracy system”.

Two days later, the Prosecutor General’s office clarified that the former employee of the Apparatus was convicted… on February 19, 2014. ACCA sources believe that in this way they are trying to remove Zilemkhan Khaydarov from the political scene. As the managing director of the Apparatus of President Karimov, he was the direct chief of A. Dustov. Without Khaydarov’s approval, the candidate for the post could not become the head of an organization of a republican scale. After his resignation in 2018, he was appointed the head of the Finance and Economic Department of the Presidential Administration of the Republic of Uzbekistan and is still one of the most influential people in the country.