Thread by @nimkef

23 April 2013

The uncle of the suspects in last week’s Boston Marathon bombing told a London court in 2010 that Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev had overseen the theft of state assets worth billions of dollars.

web.archive.org/web/2013072815…

Ruslan Tsarni, of Kyrgyzstan, worked “in various capacities” w/ a close network of associates led by Nazarbayev’s son-in-law from 2000-08 that engaged in fraud, he said in a witness statement to the High Court in London in December 2010, when he was 39 years old.

Tsarni said he moved to the U.S. in 2008 after working for the Kazakh group. He is now a U.S. citizen living in Montgomery Village, Maryland.

The claims against Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan for more than two decades, were made in a defense statement for Mukhtar Ablyazov,

In televised statements after his nephews Tamarlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were named as suspects in the April 15 terrorist attack that killed three and wounded more than 170, Tsarni called the brothers “losers” who had “put a shame on the Tsarni family.”

Tsarni’s statement to the U.K. court, made over a year before Ablyazov went into hiding, shows the brothers’ family was at one time well connected in the region and gives a link between the accused bomber’s relatives and one of the highest- profile commercial lawsuits in the UK

In his witness statement in defense of Ablyazov, Tsarni said Nazarbayev gave his “blessing” and protection to the group that rigged auctions of state assets, seized banks to sell for a fraction of their value to pre-determined buyers, and engaged in tax fraud and money laundering

Tsarni said some members of the group are now in senior management positions at BTA Bank.

The group “has been looting the bank of anything that they can get their hands on following the forced takeover,” Tsarni said in the filing.

“Very soon after Mr. Ablyazov’s forced departure from Kazakhstan in early 2009, there were those within the regime who were intent on taking the opportunity of seizing whatever assets he held within the country that were connected to BTA,” Tsarni said.

Tsarni didn’t say how he was connected to Ablyazov or came to make the filing in his defense. The allegations of state fraud also didn’t help Ablyazov in court.

Tsarni grew up in Tokmak, Kyrgyzstan, graduated from Kyrgyz State Law School in 1994. He became a legal consultant for a year for a US Co. that was contracted by USAID under a program to assist Kyrgyzstan with economic reforms and “promote private enterprise,” he said.

Tsarni provided training on international standards of corporate governance and management, according to the filing. He was also an associate at an Almaty-based law firm, he said.