The search for BTA’s missing assets began on Feb. 2, 2009, when Kazakh regulators took over the bank and turned its management over to Samruk-Kazyna AO, the Central Asian country’s sovereign wealth fund. Auditors discovered a $10 billion hole in its balance sheet. Grigori Marchenko, then chairman of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, summoned Howell to icy Almaty to review the bank’s options for recovering the money.
As Howell and a team of forensic auditors delved into BTA’s lending practices, they saw that an obscure unit called UKB6 had issued billions of dollars of credit for scores of property developments and other deals in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
“It was a bank within the bank,” says Howell, 57, a donnish Briton who peppers his conversation with quotes from Virgil and Voltaire.
Ablyazov wasn’t around to explain UKB6; he’d decamped for the U.K. Searching for another way to trace the money, Howell says, he advised Marchenko and Samruk-Kazyna Chairman Kairat Kelimbetov that the key would be found in holding Ablyazov to account in a U.K. court.
“That would get us behind his operation,” Howell says.
Rumbustious World
Enter Hardman, whose job as a litigator was to find a legal hook to take Ablyazov to court in London. Hardman, who races sports cars in his spare time, settled on a 2008 transaction in which BTA transferred $295 million to a British shell company called Drey Associates.
The deal established jurisdiction in the U.K. for all 11 lawsuits, which were designed to eventually track down the $6 billion that BTA deemed recoverable out of the missing $10 billion. Hardman scored a victory on Aug. 13, 2009, when BTA won a court order freezing all of Ablyazov’s holdings worldwide and directing him to disclose their whereabouts.
Ablyazov’s legal defense centers on the rumbustious world of Kazakh politics. He’s co-founder of a pro-democracy opposition movement and a longtime critic of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Ablyazov says the U.K.’s Metropolitan Police warned him in January 2011 that he might be the target of a politically motivated kidnapping or attack.
‘Illegal Scheme’