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Every political family has members it would rather not discuss. Very few have a member whose résumé includes the alleged financing of political assassinations abroad, laundering for security-service generals, a collapsed bank, a Paris kidnapping investigation, allegations of money laundering in Spain, a €10 million bribery scheme in Turkey, alleged links to Moldova’s most notorious fugitive oligarch, and a marriage into the presidential family that makes all of it somebody else’s problem.
Batyr Rakhimov, known in Tashkent business circles as “Batyr Alyumin,” is that member. This series examines his career, his cases, and the question his position forces on every investor, diplomat and citizen who takes Uzbekistan’s reform branding seriously: what does it mean for the country’s direction when a man with this history sits inside the President’s family circle?
His documented biography begins conventionally enough. Rakhimov was a Tashkent businessman of the post-independence generation, associated above all with aluminium trading (hence the nickname), and, through it, with the metals-and-finance nexus that produced several of independent Uzbekistan’s early fortunes. By the late 2000s he stood at the head of Kapital Bank, one of the country’s private banks, and, in the manner of Uzbek oligarchs, as president of a premier-league football club, a marker of status in the overlapping worlds of business, sport and organised crime sympathies.
He was also, by the account of most Western and regional reporting, close to Salim Abduvaliev, the Tashkent power-broker whose patronage of wrestlers and boxers made him a fixture of the 1990s criminal-commercial landscape, and whose stable of combat athletes functioned, in that era, as both a genuine sports institution and a source of muscle for commercial disputes. Alongside Abduvaliev, the Qora Mergan channel placed a criminal authority known as Husan Moskovskiy, and traced several of Rakhimov’s most profitable acquisitions to the work of the wrestlers and boxers. Proximity to Abduvaliev is not automatic evidence of anything. But it was a milieu, the intersection of aluminium, banking, combat sports and the security services, that produced both Rakhimov’s fortune and, later, his problems.
The first public milestone was his detention in 2010, in connection with the bankruptcy and collapse of Kapital Bank, whose licence was revoked that year. His brother, a deputy head of the bank, was also detained; several bank executives were convicted. Rakhimov spent time in NSS custody, and what happened next has become the pivotal unknowable of his biography. By the account of the anonymous 2020 Qora Mergan channel, Rakhimov “came out having undertaken to work for the NSS and to launder money for NSS generals.” Whatever the precise terms, the pattern is clear enough: his subordinates went to prison, and he walked, and prospered. That does not happen in Tashkent without protection purchased by service.
His subsequent movements followed the geometry of a man of consequence: he left Uzbekistan around 2016, after the death of Islam Karimov and the transition to Mirziyoyev, and settled abroad, dividing his time among Turkey, Russia and the Gulf, while remaining a figure of consequence in Uzbek commercial life.
Then came the marriage. By the account of multiple sources, including the hostile Qora Mergan channel, Rakhimov married Diyora Usmonova, a niece of the First Lady Ziroatkhon Hoshimova, making him, by marriage, a member of the extended presidential family. The channel, in an overlooked detail, said the introduction had been made by Oybek Tursunov, the President’s son-in-law, who was simultaneously Rakhimov’s business rival.
And then came Paris. On 23 June 2025, an Uzbek banker, a man who had managed money for Rakhimov and spent years in financial dispute with him, was kidnapped from a hotel in the 16th arrondissement by Chechen-speaking men, held for some two days, and released after a ransom demand reported in the millions. Le Monde reported the case; the French Brigade de Répression du Banditisme opened an investigation; a Chechen suspect was arrested and charged with organised kidnapping and sequestration. European reporting from the outset pointed to Rakhimov, the banker’s former employer and decade-long adversary, as the likely organiser. The details are examined in the articles that follow.
The list continues past Paris. Briefing materials reviewed by this outlet, and reporting in regional media, connect Rakhimov to a Spanish money-laundering investigation, a €10 million bribery scheme in Turkey, Russian and Chechen organised-crime networks, and Moldova’s sanctioned fugitive kingpin Ilan Shor. None of it is proven in the courts that matter yet, and each will be treated here with the sourcing it deserves. What is beyond caution is the structural fact they surround: a man with a checkered past, a large fortune and a dynastic marriage, positioned precisely where the succession struggle for Uzbekistan’s next decade will be decided.
Uzbekistan’s friends abroad should be asking a simple question: how did this happen? How did a businessman with this résumis end up inside the family of a President selling the world a reform story? The answer, and the danger it poses to the succession, is the story of the rest of this series.