The Week in Kazakhstan: Suspended Justice

Yerlan Turgumbayev, who served as interior minister until January 2022, was given a five-year suspended sentence for his role in Qandy Qantar (Kazakh for ‘Bloody January’), a court in Astana said on August 8. The judge considered the defendant’s admission of guilt and remorse as mitigating factors. Turgumbayev had been in detention since April 29. The case was deemed top secret and no details were disclosed. In the aftermath of Qandy Qantar, Tokayev fired Turgumbayev, but soon reappointed him as presidential adviser. He was then dismissed in August 2022. At least 238 people were killed as a result of the violent repression of widespread popular protests.

“We connected AI elements to our [...] video surveillance cameras in Almaty and Atyrau to automatically recognize fugitives, debtors and missing persons,” Berik Assylov, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General, wrote on X on August 6. Assylov said that at least 53 people were already apprehended using this method since the start of the year. He is now proposing to expanding the technology to all regions.

Russia’s missile attacks on Ukraine could be to blame for the worsening of the ecosystem in the Caspian Sea, leading to the mass death of fish and seals, a new report at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace showed on August 7. Scientists and geopolitical analysts had drawn a link between missile launches from Russia’s Caspian Flotilla and the death of Caspian seals, counting several hundred victims over the past 30 months. On August 5, Kazakhstan’s ministry of agriculture said that global warming, along with the shrinking level of the sea level, has also negatively affected the ecosystem in which Caspian seals and fish live.

Oil service workers at BerAli, a company based in Zhanaozen, in the western Mangistau region, are under pressure after 25 of them joined a trade union, one of the workers told Vlast on August 9. The workers formed a union and registered it locally. Dozens of Berali workers traveled to Astana in April last year asking to be hired directly by Ozenmunaigas, the local subsidiary of Kazmunaigas, the national oil and gas company.

Kaspi Neft was fined 13.6 billion tenge ($28.5 million) for generating an excess of 4,500 tons of hazardous materials during drilling operations, the prosecutor’s office of the Atyrau region said on August 5. Timur Kulibayev, one of Kazakhstan’s richest and the son-in-law of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, is Kaspi Neft’s ultimate beneficiary.

ANACO, a company owned by businessman Sagat Tugelbayev, was fined 673 million tenge ($1.4 million) for failing to capture 4.2 million cubic meters of gas over a five-year period, the Atyrau prosecutor’s office said on August 8. ANACO is involved in oil and gas extraction near Atyrau and also owns Zaman Energo, a company that was contracted for drilling operations by Buzachi Neft at its infamous Karaturun gas field, which leaked methane in the atmosphere for 200 days last year due to an accident.

QazAir Investments, a little-known company registered in Qatar last year, will become the owner of the Atyrau airport, a government decree said on August 7. The airport was co-owned by state controlled Atyrau Social and Entrepreneur Corporation and Turkey’s Magdenli Yer Hizmetleri ve Tasima. The latter had sued Kazakhstan’s government in 2015 for damages amounting to $16 million, but the International Chamber of Commerce dismissed the claim in 2018.

The results of the inspections carried out since 2022 on the privatization of several power and thermal plants are not available to the public, the ministry of energy told Vlast on August 5. In November 2022, then-Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov ordered that the prosecutor’s office check the transactions and contracts related to the privatization of several plants around the country.