President’s son-in-law offers to testify in U.S. in ‘Kazakhgate’ probe

politics

President’s son-in-law offers to testify in U.S. in ‘Kazakhgate’ probe

By SRI ⋅ May 19, 2008 ⋅

Rakhat Aliev, the exiled former son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbaev, says he’s ready to give evidence in a U.S. investigation into whether Nazarbaev and other Kazakh officials took bribes from U.S. businesses to receive lucrative oil contracts more than a decade ago.

Aliev’s offer comes the same week that “The Wall Street Journal” reported that Aliev’s former wife — and President Nazarbaev’s eldest daughter, Darigha Nazarbaeva — hired U.S. firms to monitor the investigation into those bribery allegations, known as “Kazakhgate.”

It is a scandal few countries want to see in the news.

Kazakhstan is becoming a major oil exporter at a time when everyone, including Western democracies, is seeking new suppliers for their energy needs.

Kazakhstan is also due to receive the rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010. The OSCE made that decision in late November 2007. By that time, Aliev had already been charged with illegal business activities, kidnapping officials from a Kazakh bank, and other crimes. But Austrian authorities rejected a Kazakh request to extradite Aliev to Kazakhstan for trial. Other, more serious charges of treason and plotting a coup soon followed and, in two separate trials earlier this year, Aliev was sentenced in absentia to 40 years in jail.

By Bruce Pannier (RFE/RL)