Mukhtar Ablyazov, who is being pursued by the Kazakh government for alleged fraud, was taken off Interpol's red list at the end of July and is now free to travel.
Interpol concluded that his presence on the list was not "compliant with the rules", according to documents from the organization that Intelligence Online obtained access to. However, Ablyazov's legal wrangles are not over - only this time he is the one on the offensive.
He has filed at least eight lawsuits in France for invasion of privacy, breach of professional confidentiality and influence peddling, accusing the French government of wrongdoing. The law suits all target the French legal system, which put him in prison for three years.
The Council of State, France's highest legal authority, refused to extradite him to Astana in December 2016, ruling that the request was politically motivated. Some of Ablyazov's lawsuits, which are being brought by lawyers Bruno Rebstock and Peter Sahlas, concern Solange Legras, the prosecutor of the court of Aix-en- Provence, which was in charge of the case against him in France.
Text messages that were allegedly taken from her telephone and published in the Ukrainian press allude to complicity with Antonin Levy, who represented Kazakhstan's BTA Bank, Ablyazov's main accuser.
Ablyazov also filed a third party suit at the end of 2016 in proceedings against Bernard Squarcini, the former head of the French internal intelligence service, the DCRI, who has been accused of breaching the secrecy of a court investigation, compromising classified information and influence peddling while working as a consultant for the corporate intelligence firm Arcanum Global Intelligence. Arcanum worked for the Kazakh government on its investigations into Ablyazov (see here).
www.intelligenceonline.com, 06.09.2017
