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A private Islamic finance advisory body has severed ties with Uzbekistan’s IMAN Invest, alleging that the fintech company misused investor funds, accumulated a shortfall of several million dollars and distributed profits to investors while part of their capital remained unrecoverable. The company’s founder has rejected the core accusations, attributing them to a payment dispute, and has commissioned a new independent audit.
The Islamic Finance Consulting Board (IFCB) — a private Uzbek consultancy specialising in sharia compliance and Islamic finance auditing, distinct from the Islamic Finance Council established under the Central Bank of Uzbekistan — announced the break in a video statement by its members, Islamic finance specialist Mahmud Usman and lawyer Husain Rajabov. The board said it had worked with IMAN Invest for more than two years without ever issuing a final positive compliance certificate, and that a number of the company’s financial transactions had never been submitted for its approval as required under their cooperation agreement.
Documents obtained by the board in July 2026 pointed, in its assessment, to numerous suspicious transactions. A review commission comprising finance, legal and sharia audit specialists then spent three and a half months examining the company’s affairs, completing its financial analysis on 15 October. The board said many of the violations it identified were acknowledged in writing by the company’s own management.
What the Audit Documents Allege
Among the documents published by Mahmud Usman is a review commission ruling dated 3 July 2026 concerning the purchase of a Mercedes-Benz S500. According to that document, on 10 April 2026 investor funds of $128,000 were transferred from the bank account of the limited partnership IMAN Halal Investments to an entity called Founders Trust 1 LLC, on the basis of a consortium agreement signed the previous day. The commission found that the funds were used to acquire the Mercedes-Benz S500 for IMAN Holding founder Rustam Rakhmatov, and that the head of Founders Trust 1 — the recipient of the transfer — was simultaneously an employee of IMAN, creating what the commission described as a conflict of interest. The commission ruled that the car should be sold or transferred to an investor with the proceeds returned to the limited partnership, with any shortfall to be recovered from Rakhmatov personally. The document bears a signature attributed by Usman to Rakhmatov; its authenticity has not been independently verified.
A second document — an annex to a resolution of the sole participant of IMAN Halal Investments LLC dated 2 July 2026 — sets out findings from a preliminary audit. It states that as of 31 May 2026 the management company owed the limited partnership $2.97 million, accumulated through repeated borrowings from investor capital to cover operating costs. Monthly payroll expenses averaged $300,000 and marketing spending reached up to $124,000 per month. The document’s authors estimated that more than 60 percent of total expenditure went to activities not directly connected to the partnership’s investment operations, citing $144,000 spent on the IMANUM 5.0 launch event and $187,000 on a private banking division. The document also flags the buy-now-pay-later portfolio: as of 31 May, problem obligations in that segment were estimated at roughly $9.5 million, or 17–18 percent of the portfolio. Dividends, the document alleges, were calculated using instalment income before the corresponding client payments had actually been received.
The $2.97 million management-company debt and the $9.5 million in troubled BNPL obligations are separate figures and cannot automatically be treated as irrecoverable investor losses or added to the overall shortfall figure cited by IFCB. The board’s statement said that even if all recoverable trading funds were returned, the company would still be unable to repay investors several million dollars — but did not specify the precise sum.
Usman stated that investor funds had been spent on personal needs including expensive cars and apartments, on management salaries, events and marketing — expenditures he said were incompatible with the mudaraba model under which IMAN Invest operates. In a mudaraba arrangement, one party provides capital and another manages it in a business venture, with profits shared according to agreed terms. IFCB’s position is that distributing profits while unrecovered capital losses exist contradicts the principles of Islamic finance. The board said it would not recommend investing in IMAN Invest from a sharia perspective until the violations were fully remedied, investor losses compensated and contracts updated. It also demanded that IMAN Invest stop using the IFCB name, its members’ names and their photographs in promotional materials.
Founder Disputes the Allegations
Rakhmatov responded in his own video address, disputing Usman’s accusations and offering a different account of the breakdown. He said the consultancy had been paid more than $100,000 in fees over roughly two and a half years of cooperation, and that the conflict arose after IMAN decided to reduce those payments. He added that IFCB had also sought a significant equity stake — shares in IMAN Holding — which he and his partners declined. “Our disagreements began precisely after we decided to reduce these payments,” he said, describing the video statement as a consequence of that refusal.
Rakhmatov also contested the claim that no positive sharia compliance opinion had ever been issued, saying the company had undergone an audit two years earlier that found its activities compliant. IFCB’s original statement had emphasised that it had never issued a final certificate covering IMAN Invest’s overall operations.
Usman responded on 26 October, calling Rakhmatov’s statements defamatory and an attempt to distract public attention from questions about how investor money had been used. He said IFCB held written explanations from company managers, commission rulings, financial transaction records and recordings of multiple Zoom meetings made with participants’ consent, and pledged to release the documents one by one.
In a separate official statement, IMAN said it took the issues raised seriously and had engaged Usmani’s — an auditing organisation linked to mufti Hasan Usmani, son of the prominent Islamic scholar Muhammad Taqi Usmani — to conduct an independent sharia audit. The company said the review had already begun and that its findings would be published regardless of the conclusions. IMAN also announced the formation of a new internal Islamic finance council of recognised scholars, and said it had suspended the launch of new products and changes to existing ones pending that council’s approval. The company urged investors not to make hasty decisions before the situation was clarified.
IMAN Holding, whose ecosystem includes the IMAN Invest platform, the IMAN Nasiya instalment service and the IMANUM super-app, reported in January 2026 that it had raised $23 million in investment during 2025 — a 149 percent increase on the previous year — with more than 60,000 users having entrusted it with capital and the total ecosystem user base exceeding 500,000 people across 52 countries. In September 2025, entrepreneur Murad Nazarov invested $2 million in IMAN Holding and joined its supervisory board. The company opened a premium investor office in Tashkent in late September 2026, headed by Thomas Funnell, a former HSBC Private Bank and Credit Suisse banker, offering personalised service to clients investing from $10,000.