ASTANA – Kazakhstan has returned assets totaling 325 billion tenge (US$684.6 million) in 2024, Prosecutor General Berik Asylov reported in an article published in the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper on July 31.
Photo credit:Arman Mukhatov
The Asset Recovery Committee seized 513,000 hectares of illegally acquired land plots. For the first time, the court fully satisfied the committee’s claim for unexplained wealth valued at 5.5 billion tenge (US$11.5 million) and the return of jewelry and cultural valuables worth 400 million tenge (US$842,625).
Asylov emphasized that the recovered assets are allocated to the country’s social and economic development. Transferring various properties to state ownership has eliminated monopolies in specific sectors, such as the transport and logistics center in the Zhetysu Region. This transfer has improved service quality for entrepreneurs on the Kazakh-Chinese border and increased the capacity of a critical storage warehouse sixfold.
Confiscated lands in the Almaty, Akmola, and Turkistan Regions have been redirected to support livestock grazing and farming needs, addressing pasture shortages.
Also, hotels, office buildings, restaurants, business centers, land plots in elite areas of large cities, markets, railway infrastructure, expensive jewelry and other high-value properties have been returned to state ownership. However, the Prosecutor General’s office still has much work to do.
“The Asset Recovery Committee is currently conducting an analysis of hundreds of movable and immovable property objects in Kazakhstan and abroad. The origin of securities worth millions of dollars, as well as over 200,000 suspicious banking transactions, and contracts for dozens of large deposits in the country is being studied. The legality of the asset sources for specific enterprises and property is being checked. In this work, we have found support from authoritative international organizations,” he said.
Kazakhstan has joined the global anti-corruption operational network GlobE for effective work, establishing a communication channel through Threema for information exchange. In February, an agreement with Presight, part of the G-42 corporation, was also signed to launch an analytical platform aimed at identifying illicit asset withdrawals.
