On a blustery February morning in 2011, Chris Hardman waited anxiously inside a Big Yellow Self Storage center in north London. A banner fastened to the box-shaped building's facade read "Get some space in your life." All Hardman wanted to do was see the contents of storage unit E2010.
He is wanted in his native Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia. He was ordered jailed in Britain. An opposition leader from a country that has been ruled by the same man since 1989, a former banker accused of siphoning off billions, Mukhtar Ablyazov has been jailed since police special forces seized him July 31 in the south of France. On Thursday, a judge is expected to rule on his extradition.
Portuguese MEP Ana Gomes has called on the European Commission to involve Eurojust and Europol in a Europe-wide investigation into Rakhat Aliyev, a Kazakhstani multi-millionaire residing in Malta.
Behind every great man is a great woman, as they say. But who stands behind the world's dictators? In good times and in bad, the ladies of the Dictators' Wives Club sure put up with a lot: corruption, political uprisings and often other wives. Some, like Rwandan First Lady Jeannette Kagame, use their position to advocate for important charitable causes in their nations.
London: Tony Blair has more than £13 million stashed in the bank following his most commercially successful year since quitting Downing Street. The latest accounts for a network of companies used to run his growing business empire show the former British prime minister's business interests around the world are booming.
A Ukrainian lawyer named Olena Tyshchenko traveled to the Royal Courts of Justice on the afternoon of July 22 as a bit player in one of the most complex legal dramas ever seen here. When she left the imposing edifice, though, she unwittingly walked into a starring role. Kazakhstan's state-owned BTA Bank had sued its former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, accusing him of embezzlement and fraud on a monumental scale. It had won billions of dollars in damages.
If democracy and the Central Asian states have proved to be mutually exclusive, there are two reasons: history and geography. Lee Kuan Yew in his The Singapore Story, recalling his country's expulsion from Malaysia, writes, "Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it." In 1991, the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — constituent units of the disintegrating Soviet Union — found themselves in a similar situation, suddenly and reluctantly independent.
