JEAN-FRANCOIS ROSNOBLET IN AIX-EN-PROVENCE
Dissident Mukhtar Ablyazov, who is accused of embezzling up to £3.64 billion from his former bank in Kazakhstan, should be extradited to Ukraine or Russia, a French court has ruled. The 50-year-old who had been in hiding since being sentenced to prison for contempt of court by an English judge 18 months ago, was arrested near the Riviera resort of Cannes last July and has been in custody since.
The former Kazakh bank chairman was once one of the world's richest men, is now the subject of the biggest UK fraud case in history. A millionaire alleged fraudster on the run, high politics, glamorous locations and beautiful women: the story of Mukhtar Ablyazov's life hardly needs turning into a John Grisham novel.
A court in France has agreed to a request from Russia to extradite Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive former Kazakh banker and political activist wanted on suspicion of fraud. Lawyers for Mr Ablyazov denounced the ruling by the court in Aix-en-Provence yesterday and said they would appeal to the Court of Cassation in Paris.
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.
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.
The wife of an exiled Kazakh oligarch accused of embezzling millions of dollars from his former bank thanked Italy yesterday for helping her to overturn a travel ban, months after she was expelled from Rome. Alma Shalabayeva, the wife of exiled oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov, thanked Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino in a phone call for helping to persuade the Kazakh government to allow her return to Europe, the Italian foreign ministry said
Rakhat Aliyev, the former son-in-law of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbaev, has applied for citizenship in Cyprus, MaltaToday has learnt. The multi-millionaire exile has been living in Malta since 2010 and claims he is being hunted down by the Kazakh secret service he once headed.
Rome prosecutors on Monday said they were investigating an alleged role played by Italian energy company Eni in the expulsion of the wife and daughter of Kazakh oligarch and political dissident Mukhtar Ablyazov earlier this year. The probe comes after Italian investigative TV program Report broadcast an anonymous interview in recent weeks with an alleged manager of Eni, which has extensive investments in resource-rich Kazakhstan.
