He says BTA is a pawn of the government, seeking to break him financially and destroy his political standing.
“I am the victim of a continuing oppressive and illegal scheme by the Kazakhstan authorities, the purpose of which is to expropriate my assets and to eliminate me as a political force,” Ablyazov testified in a London court in November 2010.
In a statement Ablyazov sent to Bloomberg News from his cell, he says that while he used shell companies as a haven for his majority stake in BTA and to manage the bank’s assets, he didn’t do so to defraud its depositors and creditors.
Rather, Ablyazov says, he was seeking to keep the money out of Nazarbayev’s reach, fearing the regime would seek to seize Ablyazov’s assets. He says that after he became chairman of BTA in 2005, Nazarbayev ordered him to make sure that at least half of his shares in the bank wound up in the hands of the president’s allies.
Shell Company
“I knew Nazarbayev too well to structure my holdings in BTA in an open and transparent way,” Ablyazov says. The Kazakh government didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As the legal battle raged in London, Hardman and Will Kenyon, a London-based forensic accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, unearthed deals in UKB6’s loan book that Hardman says he found suspicious.
In one 2007 transaction, according to court documents, BTA loaned $76 million to a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands called AstroGold Corp. even though AstroGold had only $5,000 in capital.
In another, Ablyazov transferred $1.4 billion from the bank to entities he controlled by disguising the money as loans for projects such as a Caspian Sea oil platform, according to court records.
Hardman also found that the recipients of the UKB6 loans were shell companies linked to a London-based investment firm called Eastbridge Capital LLC, which was, in turn, managed by Syrym Shalabayev, Ablyazov’s brother-in-law, according to court papers.