Rakhat Aliyev or the Man who would be Chief

by Charles van der Leeuw, KZW senior contributor (site kazworid)

Rakhat Aliyev or the Man who would be ChiefAs the story goes, one evening the Soviet elite dined with Stalin. Among them were Vyacheslav Molotov, Gyorgiy Zhukov, Nikita Khrushchyev and Lavrentiy Beria. Shortly after midnight, Stalin retired from the party and went to sleep. He never woke up. The next morning, Beria came down, boasting that Stalin had moved to the afterworld and he had personally supervised his poisoning. The others, not knowing how both their peers and the community at large would react, kept their discretion for a while, until Khrushchyev’s renowned speech in the Soviet, denouncing Beria who was tried and shot shortly afterwards. It was thus how the executor became a scapegoat.

Shakespearian plots and intrigues are nothing new in the history of Russia and the domains on its outskirts. The stories of Boris Gudonov and Prince Igor are still vividly remembered, and all know what happened to Trotsky in later times. Too much power in the hands of too few individuals — some good, some bad — leads to waning public control, and the law and its enforcement on all levels becoming far-fetched. Montesquieu meticulously described the process — taking the Roman Empire as an example but clearly pointing at the kingdoms and empires that were at their apogees in his days.

What has happened in Almaty in the high echelons of power in the last couple of years looks much less like a Shakespearian royal drama than like the script of a gangster movie. Settling accounts at gunpoint is something communities in the former Soviet domain have all but got used to during the roaring 1990s. Chicago-style business life may be over its peak, but still seems to be rampant in the former USSR. Observers tend to think that in Russia, the worst times are over now. And elsewhere. ust read and ponder.

It is January 18, 2007. Zh. Timuraliyev, the deputy chair of the board of Nurbank, the seventh-largest bank in Kazakhstan, and the head of the bank’s administration official A. Gilimov are about to make their way to the airport of Almaty for a business trip to Kiev, where they were to represent the bank’s president and majority shareholder Rakhat Aliyev. On their way, the two travellers receive a phone call from Aliyev, calling for an “urgent meeting” at the airport before their departure. He claimed that he had heard that their plane was delayed (nothing unusual) and offered to come to the airport to meet them.

The meeting was to take place, but not in any way the two officials could have imagined. Once at the airport, they were taken to a discrete room in the security zone, where Aliyev and one of his men of confidence, V. Koshlyak, were waiting for them. The room was locked, Timuraliyev and Gilimov handcuffed and tied up, and it was only after some severe beatings that they heard what they had rolled into.

Gilimov was demanded to render his stock in Nurbank at face value: 23,300 common shares at a price of 10,000 tenge, or about 30 euro at the time, “voluntarily”. As for Timuraliyev, he was to extort the business centre Ken Dala from its nominal owner, a certain B. Abdullayev, for a bargain price of 4.35 billion tenge, against the building’s par value of 14.75 billion, and hand it over to Aliyev. The two victims were ominously reminded of the risk they and their families would take by not complying.

The two gave in, but whether they thought that would be the end of a bad dream is not known. Whatever the case, on January 31 Timuraliyev, this time in the company of the deputy head of the bank’s financial administration A.Khassenov, was invited to the main office of Nurbank on 38 Dostyk (still known under its former name Lenin) Avenue. On the IXth floor, where the executives held office, they were locked up in a small meeting room and once more tied up. This time, their company of hosts was larger. The gang removed all the bank’s personnel from eyesight, and after that a long session of threats and demands were made. Not only the two executives but also their friends and relatives were to give up their business interests and property.

After midnight, the two men were dragged into a van waiting outside, and driven to Aliyev’s residence, where they were locked up in a storage room. On February 4, Khassenov was brought to the outskirts of the centre of Almaty, where he was allowed to make a phonedcall to his wife telling her that he was “hiding from the tax inspection”... Separately, Timuraliyev was brought to Druzhba, a village outside Almaty, where he was told to make a similar phonecall to his wife.

On February 9, a Toyota Land Cruiser brought the two victims further into the countryside, to a place undetected by authorities so far. What is known is that they were given inections with lidocaine, which brings the blood pressure down to lethal levels within hours. It was found in their bodies which were discovered only months later.

As said before, business settlements in this kind of style have been notorious in Moscow and other former Soviet cities ever since the break-up of the USSR. But only rarely did they engage people so close to the highest-possible political levels. For Rakhat ALiyev was not just a banker — but also the husband of Dariga Nazarbayeva and thereby the son-in-law of the President of Kazakhstan. Did he really deem himself above the law — as he also happened to be the head of the National Security Service of Kazakhstan?

If so, this should lead to the question why he felt that way. Stalin, both in the run-up and in the aftermath of the Second World War, used to give the same consignment every time he had a crackdown in mind: get to the bottom, from there back to the very top, and spare no one up the line on whatever level. So therefore, could the long string of conspiracies and attacks-in-the-back that throughout Stalin’s rule happen once more in former Soviet republics — or, at least in some republics, are they already in full swing today?

Rakhat Aliyev was certainly someone whose background as a product of shifting elites during the waning days of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbatchov would eventually allow him to reach the Olympus where his country’s decisions, for the better and for the worse, were made. The Chicago-style way of life that dominated the weird chimaera of business and public sector in control of Kazakhstan’s assets allowed things to get out of hand.

Were there, or are there, any Untouchables anywhere near the scene? If so, Aliyev, whatever he pretends to have been in those days, was certainly never one of them. The climax of the story and its uncharming (provisional) end clearly demonstrate that. So do we have a Kazakh modern-day Trotsky entrenched in Vienna? It does not look like Rakhat Aliyev has a stature that would even remotely remind one of Trotsky’s. It rather looks very much indeed as though the only thing the two have in common is the hot breath of a mighty adversary in their necks. As we shall see in the follow-up of this modest attempt to describe the Aliyev episode in its appropriate proportions and context, there could be a Hollywood movie in it — but certainly no opera as in the cases of Boris Gudonov and Prince Igor.