Prosecutor General’s Office implements special project to repatriate stolen assets
According to Assanov, while law-enforcement structures carry out investigations, the criminals can easily transfer the stolen money abroad and leave the country. In other words, the investigators spend too much time on fighting with bureaucracy.
As per the data provided by the Prosecutor General’s Office, the amount of money stolen from Kazakhstan and transferred to offshore accounts exceeded 10bln tenge in the past 10 years. As for uninvestigated cases, the amount of stolen money remains unknown.
“I have recently told about Taizhanov’s case [Chief of Azbuka Zhilya construction company – editor] who is accused of embezzlement of 14bln tenge. Taizhanov left for Austria and spent this money on buying real estate. Unfortunately, we cannot properly work on such cases. Our specialists can excellently investigate into the cases related to people, thefts, murders and frauds. But we lag behind in investigating into financial crimes. Why? Because these crimes are committed by well-educated people with good technical opportunities. And what we do? Instead of searching for this money and seizing bank accounts, we carry out examinations and calculate the amount of the damage incurred. Meantime, the criminals transfer the stolen money to their offshore accounts and leave the country,” says Assanov.
As Zhakip Assanov noted, there is a number of problems in extradition of criminals. The first problem is that the law-enforcement officials of foreign countries do not understand the requests from Kazakhstan, because Kazakhstani specialists cannot clearly explain what they want. Secondly, our investigators do not know foreign experience and rules of the countries where the requests are sent.
In this regard, the Prosecutor General’s Office is implementing a special project aimed at repatriation of stolen money to Kazakhstan. 10 specialists will be trained for this purpose and later they will share foreign experience with their colleagues.