Kazakhstan’s government filed a $15 million lawsuit in Switzerland against subsidiaries of Italy’s Eni, one of the oil majors involved in some of the largest oil and gas fields in the country, in an effort to strengthen its position in another case, an arbitration claim worth around $160 billion.
The Swiss lawsuit accuses a number of companies and individuals tied to Eni of corruption, documents show.
Because of the sluggish development of the arbitration claim, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Kazakhstan is using legal discovery in other jurisdictions to prop up its main claim.
As part of discovery efforts, a US judge allowed former executive Maksat Idenov to issue a deposition. Idenov was questioned in Houston, Texas as part of a multi-jurisdiction legal effort.
Idenov’s name appeared on US diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks, when in 2010 he touted the risks of leaving negotiations about the sale of a 10% stake in Karachaganak’s gas and condensate project to the government. “You never know how an arbitration case will play out,” Idenov allegedly said at the time.
The Swiss lawsuit is connected to a March 2025 civil complaint that PSA, the agency in charge of the contracts regulating the management of the Karachaganak and Kashagan fields, filed in Switzerland. There, PSA claimed that alleged embezzlement schemes were used to “bribe officials in Kazakhstan” and “remunerate certain Eni executives” and intermediaries between 2006-2011. In March 2025, PSA also requested Idenov's testimony in the Texas court.
One of the claims of the Swiss lawsuit is the alleged 11 amendments to a service contract for oilfield services, which ballooned from its original value of $88 million to $490 million.
According to Bloomberg, “Kazakhstan said in its US court filings that contractors providing services to Eni in the country ‘orchestrated an illegal scheme’ to secure inflated contracts.”
At the time of the alleged “illegal scheme,” Idenov was a vice president of Kazmunaigas, Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil and gas company that owns stakes in both Karachaganak and Kashagan. He later would become a vice president at Eni and is now head of Strategy and Business Development at Eni US.
The US Court in Houston dismissed three of PSA’s discovery applications, which sought the disclosure of documents from Eni.
The company said in a statement that it “was fully exonerated by the Italian authorities following their investigation more than a decade ago. We therefore believe that there is no basis for these allegations against any Eni company.”
Kazakhstan’s government has previously been on the losing end of arbitration proceedings that had involved multi-jurisdiction discovery efforts and lawsuits. Last year, it agreed to pay a Moldovan businessman an undisclosed sum to end the so-called “Stati case.”
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