The Paris kidnapping: a banker seized in the 16th arrondissement
The facts of 23 June 2025, so far as they are publicly established through French and international reporting, are these. An Uzbek banker, 48 years old, checked into…
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Uzbekistan’s Tax Committee says performing artists will face mandatory income-tax collection from 2027, after declared earnings of just 6.5 billion soums in 2025 exposed the scale of non-compliance. The announcement has drawn sharp criticism from prominent entertainers, even as the culture minister says refusing to pay tax should be a source of shame.
Anorbank shareholder Kakhramon Olimov has publicly denied Uzbek kidnapping charges, saying he was the victim of a Paris abduction in June 2025 — not its perpetrator — as a French investigation leads to seven suspects and an Interpol red notice quietly disappears.
The Ministry of Construction has corrected its own minister’s parliamentary testimony, saying Tashkent has 61 illegal apartment blocks, not 720-plus — but the revised total across all unauthorised structures is itself smaller than the original apartment-only figure, a discrepancy the ministry left unexplained.
President Mirziyoyev visited Sulton Tex Group’s new $54 million Kashkadarya factory on 21 October and ordered the National Bank to prepare financing to double the cluster’s capacity, as its founder pledged 30,000 new jobs by 2028 and $150 million in annual exports.
Uzbekistan’s Competition Committee is investigating claims that pharmaceutical importers and wholesale distributors are forcing pharmacies to buy unwanted medicines alongside high-demand drugs, a practice that may breach competition law and expose offenders to fines of up to five percent of relevant revenues.
Uzbek economists Otabek Bakirov and Murod Muhammadjonov have challenged four tax proposals—cashback abolition, expanded product marking, social-tax exemptions and a carbon levy—arguing each lacks the independent cost-benefit analysis needed to justify it.
Batyr Rakhimov, a businessman and former president of football club Pakhtakor, was unanimously elected chairman of the Uzbekistan Tennis Federation on 17 February 2025 at an extraordinary conference held at the National Olympic Committee, replacing Alisher Mirsоatov, who departed to lead the Association of Winter Sports.
The former head of Jambay District’s ecology department has been sentenced to five years in prison for accepting an 11-million-soum computer in exchange for shelving an illegal tree-felling case and releasing an impounded truck.
Cabinet Resolution No. 585, signed on 21 October 2026, sets out a graduated financial penalty system for firms that over-abstract water or operate without contracts and permits, effective from 2027.
Latest Investigations
View allCabinet Resolution No. 585, signed on 21 October 2026, sets out a graduated financial penalty system for firms that over-abstract water or operate without contracts and permits, effective from 2027.
Uzbekistan’s road inspectorate found 5,815 violations at construction, reconstruction and repair sites in the first nine months of 2026, issuing more than 2,100 mandatory orders and forwarding 452 administrative cases to courts, even as fines for non-compliance were cut sharply under new legislation.
Joint raids by five Uzbek agencies between 19–21 October uncovered more than 120 cases of illegal gas-cylinder hoarding and above-rate resale, with state utility workers implicated in 39 cases and over 3,000 cylinders seized as evidence.
Amendments to 33 departmental instruments, registered by the Ministry of Justice on 20 October 2026, require banks, notaries, domestic airports and other bodies to accept digital versions of passports, ID cards, birth certificates and other key documents.
President Mirziyoyev has ordered officials to advance a package of infrastructure projects in Kashkadarya including a $350mn ADB-backed highway reconstruction and water supply schemes targeting 1.25 million residents.
A draft regulation published for public comment sets out the rules, principles and timelines for state accreditation of Uzbekistan’s educational institutions, with five-year cycles and the State Inspectorate for Education Quality Control as the governing authority.
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…
Business
More ⮞The facts of 23 June 2025, so far as they are publicly established through French and international reporting, are these. An Uzbek banker, 48 years old, checked into a hotel in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. He was, by the accounts that followed, a significant figure: the manager of an investment portfolio…
Governance & Reform
More ⮞Uzbekistan’s Tax Committee says performing artists will face mandatory income-tax collection from 2027, after declared earnings of just 6.5 billion soums in 2025 exposed the scale of non-compliance. The announcement has drawn sharp criticism from prominent entertainers, even as the culture minister says refusing to pay tax should be a source of shame.
The EU’s 21st Russia sanctions package targets two Kazakhstani firms, three Kyrgyz companies, a Kyrgyz bank connected to Russia’s SWIFT alternative, and 14 cryptocurrency platforms, as Brussels escalates pressure on Central Asian trade and financial channels.
A Saudi-led international consortium has signed a 35-year public-private partnership to build a new Tashkent airport by 2030, with a $2.5 billion first phase designed to replace a city-centre facility already approaching its capacity limit.
An OCCRP investigation has found that ten foreign companies — including two UK-registered firms that declared themselves dormant — won over $200 million in contracts from Uzbekistan’s state-owned Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Complex, with evidence pointing to a single individual behind the network and forged signatures on key documents.
The Competition Promotion and Consumer Protection Committee has identified procurement violations worth nearly 2.5 billion soums across cases in Karakalpakstan, Samarkand, Tashkent Region and Tashkent City, initiating formal proceedings and referring officials to judicial authorities for administrative action.
The Competition Promotion and Consumer Protection Committee has identified procurement violations worth more than 8.1 billion soums across six Uzbek regions, initiating cases, imposing fines and cancelling at least one tender after finding rigged evaluations, affiliated bidders and competition-restricting documents.
Enforcement actions in Surkhandarya and Jizzakh regions have resolved competition-law violations in public tenders worth nearly 3.5 billion soums, with financial penalties imposed and administrative cases against responsible officials sent to the courts.
Kazakhstan’s Supreme Audit Chamber has presented parliament with findings of financial losses, expired drugs dispensed to patients, and price markups of up to 600 percent in the public drug procurement system — triggering an unprecedented legal threat from the Health Ministry and calls for sweeping reform.
From the paralysis of dual power after Nazarbayev’s 2019 resignation to the post-January 2022 prosecutions of security chiefs, oligarchs and former ministers, Kazakhstan’s anti-corruption drive has returned more than $1.5 billion in assets from a single convict alone — while leaving other members of the old guard untouched.
Javlon Yunusov, named as the prime suspect in the October shooting targeting presidential insider Komil Allamjonov, has been arrested in South Korea on an Interpol red notice — but extradition is reported to be stalled. The investigation has exposed a web of connections spanning Uzbekistan’s pharmaceutical sector, a Chechen-linked criminal network active in Turkey, and the informal use of privileged government licence plates.
A Tashkent shell company capitalised at under $10,000 collected more than $100 million in Uzbek state gas contracts before disappearing. Ozodlik’s investigation traces its corporate network to President Mirziyoyev’s son-in-law Otabek Umarov through a web of UAE entities, a British citizenship-by-investment broker and the chairman of the national judo federation.
The UFA Ethics Committee has imposed lifetime bans on three match officials and Kokand-1912’s sports director after finding they conspired to fix two Pro League matches in 2023.
A Ministry of Investments official and five others have been detained across Samarkand, Jizzakh and Syrdarya regions after allegedly charging citizens up to $41,600 for fake US visa and migration services, the State Security Service announced.