Listen to the article
Large investment projects in Uzbekistan can no longer be approved or advanced to their next implementation stage unless they have first passed a mandatory anti-corruption expert review and an assessment of their impact on the competitive environment. The requirement, introduced as a binding oversight mechanism, is designed to detect and prevent corruption risks before public or private capital is committed at scale.
Under the new rules, no major investment project may receive approval if its corruption-risk level is rated high. In that event, a negative conclusion is issued on the project’s admissibility and feasibility, and approval remains blocked until every deficiency identified in the expert and assessment findings has been remedied. The sequencing is deliberate: flaws must be corrected at the review stage, not discovered after construction or procurement has begun.
Who Conducts the Reviews
The anti-corruption expert reviews and competition-impact assessments are carried out by internal anti-corruption control units within the relevant organisations. The Anti-Corruption Agency of Uzbekistan holds responsibility for coordinating the entire process and providing its methodological basis — in effect setting the standards and procedures that internal units must follow when examining projects at each mandatory stage.
The requirement that projects pass review at defined stages, rather than once at the outset, means that a project which clears an initial assessment cannot automatically proceed: each subsequent phase triggers a fresh examination. That structure is intended to close the gap that has historically allowed corruption risks to emerge mid-project, after oversight attention has moved elsewhere.
Why the Mechanism Matters
Large infrastructure and investment projects have long been identified in Uzbekistan’s anti-corruption discourse as environments where procurement manipulation, inflated valuations and conflicts of interest tend to concentrate. By making expert clearance a legal precondition for approval — rather than an advisory step — the framework shifts the burden onto project sponsors to demonstrate compliance before funds flow, rather than onto investigators to prove wrongdoing after the fact. A negative conclusion does not constitute a finding of corruption; it is a procedural bar that holds until the identified weaknesses are addressed.
The Anti-Corruption Agency’s coordinating role gives a single body visibility across the pipeline of major projects, allowing it to track whether internal review units are applying consistent standards and to flag systemic patterns rather than isolated cases.