Listen to the article
Tashkent city police have opened a criminal case against the management of Imarat Development LLC, a construction company whose registered office sits on Buyuk Avlod Shoh Street in the Sergeli district, after investigators found that the firm misled buyers about where their apartments would actually be built and then refused to return their money.
The Tashkent City Internal Affairs Department’s Investigation Directorate announced the case, citing Articles 168 and 192-11 of Uzbekistan’s Criminal Code — covering fraud and the abuse of authority by officials of non-state commercial organisations, respectively. Several citizens had filed complaints against the company’s leadership, prompting a formal inquiry.
What Investigators Found
Checks established that the multi-storey residential buildings Imarat Development had contracted to build were located not in Sergeli — the Tashkent district where the company’s office is based and where buyers understood they were purchasing — but in Quyi Chirchiq district of Tashkent region, a considerably more remote area. When buyers discovered the discrepancy and demanded refunds for the sums they had paid for their apartments, the company declined to return the money.
The case follows investigative reporting published in December 2025 that described how citizens who signed contracts with businessman Marat Hamdamov in 2023 and 2024 had been misled about the location of their properties, believing they were buying in Sergeli when the actual sites were in distant parts of Tashkent region. After that report appeared, officials from the Interior Ministry contacted the publication and the complainants and began preliminary inquiries.
Wider Pattern of Enforcement
The Imarat Development case is not isolated. A separate criminal case has been opened against officials of Perfect-Mansions LLC, another company linked to Marat Hamdamov, with the Tashkent city prosecutor’s office conducting an investigation into the Tuzel Park residential complex. Construction inspectors also found that multi-storey buildings at the Sergeli City residential complex in Quyi Chirchiq district were being erected without state registration and in violation of building rules; work on that site has been halted.
Separately, apartments at the Rohat residential complex in Tashkent’s Yashnobod district — built by Broccoli Plus LLC — were put up for auction after that company accumulated a $5.5 million debt to a bank, leaving buyers in a further precarious position.
The convergence of criminal proceedings, halted construction and auction-forced sales across several linked projects points to systemic failures in how residential pre-sales were structured and supervised in the Tashkent market, with ordinary buyers bearing the financial risk when developers defaulted on their obligations.