A court in the capital of Kazakhstan has extended the prison sentence of ex-Culture Minister Arystanbek Mukhamediuly to 11 years and banned him for life from holding positions in the civil service after finding him guilty on charges of embezzlement and bribery.

The Astana court also ruled on February 13 to strip Mukhamediuly of all his state awards. Also in the dock were the ex-minister’s wife and lawyer, who received six-month and seven-year prison terms, respectively.

Mukhamediuly has had a torrid couple of years.

He was arrested in May 2022 and then sentenced in June 2023 to eight years in prison for misappropriating 221 million tenge ($490,000) allocated by the Kazakh government for a historical and cultural exhibition held in India in 2020.

He has staunchly denied his guilt.

More cases have been filed against him since then, including for illegally privatizing a state-owned sports school and fraudulently taking ownership of the Diplomat Hotel in Astana. Investigators claim he lent a large amount of money to the hotel’s owner in 2019 and then proceeded to take over his business by forging documents.

Investigators have moreover said that Mukhamediuly tried to settle his legal predicaments by bribing government officials.

“In December 2022, [Mukhamediuly], while in a pre-trial detention center in Astana, wanting to be released from custody and retain ownership of the [Diplomat] hotel, set out with criminal intent to give an especially large bribe to officials through a lawyer,” the indictment against the ex-minister stated, adding that he tried to involve his wife as an intermediary.

Mukhamediuly's wife, Galiya Iskakova, is accused of transferring $460,000 to their lawyer, Mustakhim Tuleyev. The lawyer, however, appropriated the money for himself.

Iskakova was found guilty of mediation in bribery, while Tuleyev was found guilty of fraud on an especially large scale.

Mukhamediuly has frequently found himself at the center of scandals.

In 2016, film director Talgad Zhanybekov accused the then-Culture and Sports Minister of corruption. Zhanybekov claimed that he was unable to get hold of money earmarked by the state for the filming of a feature movie called Phoenix as Mukhamediuly was demanding to be given a cut.

The minister sued the director for libel and won.

Later that year, a former student at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts, Enlik Sydykova, accused Mukhamediuly of sexual harassment. The incident was not officially investigated.

Heavily government-critical news outlet Respublika argued in an article in May 2022 that Mukhamediuly had for years “managed to get away with scandals” because he enjoyed the patronage of the team around of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who stepped down in 2019 but retained considerable influence for years after that.

It was only after a wave of political unrest in January 2022, much of it directed at the legacy of cronyism and corruption of the Nazarbayev years, that many of the former president’s associates began to lose their former untouchable status.