Will Klebanov Be Punished or Will He Get Away With It With an Innocent Shock?

The Ekibastuz Chimney Disaster, as we call it, once more confirmed our people’s suppositions, that its owner, one of the richest persons in Kazakhstan, Alexander Klebanov, did not invest anything into the asset, preferring to just collect his profits.

The collapse of one of the biggest banks in the country, Eximbank, in the middle of 2000-s, sales of uranium mines for ridiculously low prices and the Ekibastuz Disaster – those events are only the top of the Fatberg of Klebanov’s “Curriculum Sabotagum”.

So, where did he invest his capitals?  Given semi-ruined condition of the Ekibastuz Power Plant #2, it appears that Klebanov did not invest into modernization of the asset.  He transferred moneys to offshore companies and invested in real estate abroad, as well as bought himself citizenships of other countries. 

Recently, bodies of prosecution reported, that in the last 3 years, citizens of Kazakhstan paid excessive KZT 30 billion, or some USD 80 million, for electric energy.

Below is our attempt to look into, what role the majority shareholder of the collapsing power plant played in cannibalization of our industrial legacy.

Ou Est Cet Argent?

According to Forb’s Kazakhstan, in spring 2022, Alexander Klebanov’s riches totaled USD 580 million. 

The famous Paradise Papers, an open data-base containing information about 13.4 million offshore companies, has his name, as well.

ICIJ OCCRP report that Klebanov belongs with a famous group of Kazakh businessmen from Meridian Capital Limited.

There is another Kazakh oligarch in that group – Yevgeniy Feld, Son-in-Law of a famous Kazakh oppositional politician Bulat Abilov. A former Kazakhstan citizen, Yevgeniy Feld now permanently domiciles in Cyprus. 

In our publications, we reported that Feld and his associates’ business empire grew stronger on the back of cheap loans from Kazkommertzbank. Those associates are Sauat Mynbayev, a former Kazakh Prime-Minister, Askar Alshinbayev and Nurzhan Subhanbedrin. Paradise Papers, however, do not indicate what Klebanov’s cut in Meridian is.

Journalists, nevertheless, located Klebanov’s luxury mansion in the vicinity of Cannes. Officially, the mansion belongs to a company going under the corporate title of Sci Du 985 Chemin Du Retenaou, a legal entity owned by Klebanov, his spouse Dariya and ther son Yakov. The family paid Euro 3.1 million for the mansion in 2007.

The above is not all. Klebanov owns another estate in French Riviera. 

In April 2007, Klebanov and his son registered a company going under the name of Roche D’azur in Nice with the legal address at Du Mon Boron Blvd., 46. The charter capital of the company is Euro 1,200.

The above is not all, either. Alexander Klebanov has two citizenships, with the second being that of Israel. 

For those who were born in Kazakhstan, and then moved to their historic homeland, Klebanov’s Israeli citizenship is not a secret.  We know, that this Kazakh citizen received our citizenship in November 1998.  In our country, we have a rather complicated procedure, by which new immigrants must prove their Jewish roots, particularly, when they deal with bodies of Rabbis, but Klebanov managed to do so.  Referring to his Father, Mother and brothers and sisters, he managed to convince the authorities he was a Jew,

our source in the Israeli Ministry of Absorption reported to us.

Looks like Klebanov wants to replicate a successful “homeland change” experiment pioneered for him by Bulat Abilov’s Son-in-Law Yevgeniy Feld. Otherwise, how do we explain the fact, that all companies directed or owned by Klebanov become insolvent or collapsed?

Friend or Foe…

Let us, explore, for example, the deliberate bankruptcy of the once powerful Eximbank, where Klebanov held 31% through CAPEC, Central Asia Electric Power Corporation. On 18 April 2018, President Nazarbayev, on a big meeting dedicated to a discussion of the National Bank and the indigenous banking sector, in general, asked participants a rhetoric question about Eximbank, Astana Bank and Qazaq Bank, particularly nasty performance indicators shown by all three.  He demanded explanation, whether it was poor management by shareholders, as well as how come those individuals brought the banks to the condition of severe debt and inability to give clear answers to bank clients. The final touch was the question as to, how those three could work, at all.

Almost immediately after President Nazarbayev’s questions, S&P diminished Eximbank’s ratings to the lowest level, but Klebanov managed to “bail” – he left the bank two days prior to collapse. 

Oppositional Mass Media of Kazakhstan revealed that by the time, when Klebanov stepped down from the Eximbank BoD, almost all of its cash had been placed in offshore accounts. 

Our esteemed audience already know, where exactly those funds found themselves a warm refuge.  

Klebanov put the blame on his business partner, former member of the CAPEC BoD Yerkin Amirhanov.  He claimed that his ex-friend drove the bank in “muddy waters”, by means of various grey schemes and hiding that from other partners – Klebanov and Kan. So, according to Klebanov, it was Amirhanov supposed to assume responsibility for the collapse of the bank.

Law enforcement launched a criminal investigation of Amirhanov’s activities, but for reasons not associated with the Eximbank bankruptcy, and his share in Eximbank became Klebanov’s.

Plane Down

Collapse of the bank is far from being all. Do your remember the Bek Air aviation company, which was deprived of its flight certificate after 17 April 2020 accident killing 15 passengers?

Bek Air was owned by Klebanovs, namely – their son, Yakov. 

After that tragedy, the Kazakhstan Aviation Administration published a report regarding the outcome of the audit of the company. The company personnel would fake technical logs. They would put false serial numbers on engines, thus making it impossible for aviation inspectors to calculate the true time those engines were in operation. 

Instead of buying new spare parts, they would take parts from a plane and install them on another. The company never addressed the engines manufacturer, Rolls Royce, with requests to perform capital overhaul and repairs of those engines

Who knows, may be, should the April 2020 tragedy not happen, he would suffer from more accidents of the kind.  But God saved.

Glacial Era

So, what collapsed the Ekibastuz Heat Power Plant #2? One of the versions was that those were mining farms that collapsed it.

Mass Media assure that Klebanov gave his share in Kazakhtelecom to a Luxembourg company possessed by Kairat Satypaldy. The latter individual turned out to be an owner of semi-legal mining farms, which farms received power from Heat Power Plants owned by Sergey Kan and Satypaldy.

In one such Heat Power Plant, located in the city of Petropavlovsk, a chimney collapsed on 20 March, 2022, killing a woman. Several days after, police arrested and put in investigative jail the director and the senior engineer of the plant. 

Klebanov got away with it, sustaining a slight innocent chock. 

A week after, several boilers in the same Heat Power Plant collapsed and energy generation dropped down by four times, compared to initial technical specification. 

We do not exclude, that the Ekibastuz Heat Power Plant #2, where equipment had not been renovated since the times of Brezhnev, collapsed, because of those semi-legal mining farms. 

Lost in Mines…

The supposition that Klebanov changed his citizenship is rather trustworthy. Otherwise, how do you explain sales of Kazakh assets?

Middle East Eye report, that Rosatom of Russia have plans to buy a uranium asset in Kazakhstan for USD 1.6 billion. That sum is a part of a USD 9.1 billion credit line, out of which amount USD 7 billion will be used for construction of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Station in Turkey. There will be 4 VVER-1200 reactors there.  USD 500 million, out of said credit line will be used to buy lithium assets. 

That Kazakhstan “uranium asset”, probably, stands for 49% in the Joint-venture Budenovskoye, which JV belongs to the Stepnogorsk Mining-Chemical Combine, where Klebanov is another shareholder. 

Budenovskoye is a major uranium deposit in Kazakhstan. Uranium ore reserves in Areas #6 and #7 totaled 114.2 thousand tons in the end of 2021.

Kazatomprom did not confirm or confront the information about Klebanov’s talks with Rosatom. 

A trustworthy source assured Globalnews.kz, that Klebanov bought the mine for a cheap price, when the not-exactly-unknown Muhtar Dzhakishev was in charge of Kazatomprom. 

It was then, that Dzhakishev promised to make Kazakhstan a global uranium leader and conducted numerous negotiations with potential uranium investors, as well as entered into an agreement with Japan partners, by which Kazakhstan would sell enriched uranium to that country. 

In the course of Dzhakishev criminal investigation, that fact became known, but Klebanov, as usual, made it out of that dirty situation in one piece,

our source reports.

Will Klebanov again get away with it this time, after the Ekibastuz Chimney Disaster? Will he again sustain nothing but a slight innocent shock? Let investigators answer those questions. But, looks like, a public apology shall not be enough.