When the post of president was established in 1990, he was selected to fill it.
By the middle of his career, he was at the top of the party structure in Soviet Kazakhstan, holding positions including prime minister and first secretary of the local Party branch. The fourth told OCCRP that the former president did not benefit from any of the assets it held, which were dedicated to securing financing for educational institutions named after him.īorn into a peasant family, Nazarbayev joined the Soviet Communist Party in his early 20s and rose steadily through its ranks. Three of Nazarbayev’s foundations did not respond either. What will happen to his billions is still unclear.Ī spokesman for Nazarbayev did not respond to requests for comment. Nazarbayev himself has hardly been heard from since the unrest began, and his political influence may be at its end. The popular demonstrations were accompanied by an apparent struggle for power behind the scenes, with President Tokayev announcing on January 5 that he had taken over Nazarbayev’s role as head of the security council.
A photograph widely shared online showed a toppled statue of Nazarbayev. The chant “Old man, leave!” became a mainstay of the demonstrations. This explains why, after local protests against high fuel prices in Western Kazakhstan spread across the country in early January, they quickly turned into demands for broader political change - and became personal. He installed a hand-picked successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and retained control of the security council. The system barely changed after Nazarbayev resigned from the presidency in 2019. Under Nazarbayev’s long years of leadership, most Kazakhstanis have seen little benefit from their country’s vast mineral wealth, even as it lined the pockets of a circle of billionaires, including members of Nazarbayev’s family and officials close to him. These findings exemplify the corruption and stark inequality that has plagued Kazakhstan since it gained from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The result is that Nazarbayev’s non-profit organizations actually own larger business portfolios than many multinational conglomerates. In other cases, the government of Kazakhstan poured money into private companies which were then acquired by the charitable foundations. Some of the assets were transferred to Nazarbayev’s foundations, or are still co-owned, by oligarchs who owe their riches to the crony capitalism that flourished during his rule. But even while handing out gifts to children or popularizing the Kazakh language, these organizations have secretly acquired stakes in dozens of businesses. He controls them through an unusual mechanism: Four private charitable foundations, all started by him over the course of his long rule, ostensibly to help the people of Kazakhstan. But the person behind all of them is Kazakhstan’s longtime leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. There is no obvious connection between all of these businesses and assets, which are worth at least $8 billion. But also less glamorous possessions: warehouses, a pasta factory, and at one point, even a landscaping company. Some of Kazakhstan’s most luxurious hotels, multiple shopping centers, and a golf course. Because the foundations do not publish annual reports, and some of their assets are hidden behind secretive foreign commercial structures, there is little transparency in where these billions are or where they might end up - especially since the country has plunged into turmoil.Ī private jet worth over $100 million.Legal experts say that, in this arrangement, he has the ultimate say-so in what the foundations do - and this includes selling or giving away anything they own.Nazarbayev does not formally “own” this fortune, but since he is the founder of these organizations, he does control it.The Nazarbayev assets under the control of charitable foundations include luxury hotels, banks, factories, warehouses, and other possessions amounting to at least $8 billion.But they have another function: Owning assets worth billions of dollars. Kazakhstan’s state media has devoted frequent upbeat coverage to the good works performed by Nazarbayev’s multiple charitable foundations.