Keremet Bank, the country’s largest financial institution, was sold to Kazakh bankers, with a total turnover of management staff, many of whose members have ended up detained on charges that have not yet been clarified. According to many sources, in the past he has laundered a lot of illegal money from the family of Kurmanbek Bakiev, president of Kyrgyzstan from 2005 to 2010. And it remains unclear who is really behind the new buyers.
Bishkek () – The complicated affair of Keremet Bank of Kyrgyzstan, heir to Rosinbank that had been incorporated into the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic since 2018, has ended with an unexpected privatization. It is the largest financial institution in the country, with a well-developed regional network and various service infrastructures for different market sectors. The bank has always presented itself as the most “international” in Kyrgyzstan, with a very flexible pricing policy and advanced customer relations systems.
Now Keremet has been sold to Kazakh bankers, with a total turnover of management staff, several of whose members have ended up detained on charges that have not yet been clarified. A new board of directors was installed, which appointed a well-known Kazakh manager, Tatiana Kuržej, as director, along with president Natalia Družinina. The Ministry of Finance in Bishkek, to which the bank had been entrusted last March, did not make any official statement.
On August 2, according to information from the Ministry of Justice, the bank had then gone through the procedure of a new registration, about which there is also no detailed information. Only hints about the bank’s sale to foreigners appeared in the media; The AkiPress agency reported that 75% of the authorized capital had been sold to a Luxembourg company. On the other hand, a deputy from Žogorku Keneš, Dastan Bekešev, had written on his social pages that the bank had been sold to the Russians.
According to information published in recent days, the bank was sold to the Kazakhs for 850 million soms (about 10 million euros), a sum lower than what the Kyrgyz government had paid to take it over in the previous months. The Ministry of Finance has not confirmed this information either. Tatiana Kuržej comes from the “Eurasian Bank” of Kazakhstan, where she was deputy director, and Natalia Družinina was in turn vice president of the same institution, whose main shareholder is the “Eurasian Finance Company”, based in Almaty, which, according to its website officially, it belongs to several Kazakh billionaires: Aleksandr Maškevič, Patokh Šodiev and Mukadaskhan Ibragimova, widow of the late Aližan Ibragimov. Another new member of the bank’s board of directors, Klara Ermakbaeva, previously held the position of director of Kazakhstan’s Bank Tsentr Kredit.
The Kyrgyz expert in financial investments, Šumkarbek Adilbek Uulu, commented on these vicissitudes stating that “it is difficult to understand the steps taken only by the designated figures at the top of the structure, in the business world it is not difficult to keep the true beneficiaries hidden. of transactions, which pass through offshore routes. The history of Keremet is also linked to that of Asia Universal Bank, owned by Maksim Bakiev, son of Kurmanbek Bakiev, president of Kyrgyzstan between 2005 and 2010, the year of the revolution that clouded the country’s political life for years. According to many sources, the Bakievs’ bank cleaned up much of the family’s illegal money and then transformed into Zalkar Bank, Rosinbank and finally Keremet, receiving 8 billion soms (about 85 million euros) from the state budget.
Later, investigations also declared these funds missing, several executives were arrested, and the bank was forced to declare bankruptcy. However, the Prosecutor General’s Office did not conclude the procedure and, after a series of “secret” meetings, it was finally handed over to the Kazakhs, behind whom it is not clear who is really hiding and where the considerable money of the Kyrgyz people.
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