State auditors in Kyrgyzstan have released a report that they say documents financial malfeasance and waste at government-controlled gold mining entities formerly run by a one-time close ally of the president. 

The Audit Chamber said in its findings, published on February 2, that Tengiz Bolturuk splurged large amounts on non-core activities from May 2021 through to February 2022, when he worked as a government-installed external manager of the Kumtor goldmine, and subsequently, as head of the Great Nomads Heritage state holding company.

Some of the 32 or so side projects initiated under Bolturuk's watch included a bottled-water company, the construction of a five-star hotel, a hippodrome and a marble factory, the chamber said.

A legal representative for the ex-mining executive has strongly condemned the Audit Chamber report, describing it as a calculated attempt to smear his client ahead of upcoming court trials. Bolturuk was arrested in September on charges of appropriating around 1 billion soms ($11 million) while at Kumtor and the Great Nomads Heritage.

What government investigators say they have uncovered represents another stark decline in the fortunes of Bolturuk, a dual Kyrgyz-Canadian citizen who was given the task in 2021 of wresting control of the Kumtor gold mine, which accounted at peak production for more than one-tenth of Kyrgyzstan’s economy, from a Toronto-based company.

When President Sadyr Japarov placed Bolturuk, an old friend, in charge of running the better part of Kyrgyzstan’s gold industry, many questioned the wisdom of the move. The findings of the Audit Chamber, if accurate, would vindicate those objections. 

The Audit Chamber stated that during its deep dive into Bolturuk’s managerial activities from May 2021 to June 2022, it detected 63 “violations,” most of which it cast as inefficiency and unaccountable overspend, while also hinting strongly at criminal wrongdoing. 

The entire point of creating Great Nomads Heritage in late 2021 was to enhance efficiency and profitability at the companies under its umbrella. Going by the narrative woven by auditors, this initiative seems to have been a fiasco. 

Bolturuk not only failed to get Kumtor to meet its production targets, he is also alleged to have dipped into the company’s budget to fund his own vanity undertakings, auditors said. Around $1.7 million was taken from Kumtor to pay the salaries of local and foreign hires tasked with carrying out projects that, like the refurbishment of a horse-racing track in the city of Karakol, have yet to be completed.

Another complaint related to the decision to move Kumtor headquarters to premises at the Orion business center in downtown Bishkek, which incurs rental costs of $106,000 per month.

Auditors dwelled on what they deemed to be an excessive outlay on travel costs by Kumtor staff. Between June 2021 and June 2022, more than 6.1 million soms ($73,000) were spent on air tickets, hotel rooms, and car rentals for Kumtor employees and their relatives.

Some of the quibbling can appear tendentious. One example of purported waste is a three-day team-building exercise for 800 employees in a location on the Issyk-Kul Lake. Auditors complain that this exercise, which they say saw pop stars and traditional sports athletes enlisted as part of the entertainment, resembled “a heads of state summit.” They go on to state, however, that all this incurred costs of 4.2 million soms ($50,000), which is to say just over $60 per participant.

The Audit Chamber report devotes much room to raising questions over Bolturuk’s potentially suspicious spending. 

It states in one passage that he approved an outlay of $137,000 on office cars. One of those cars was then gifted to the head of the state ecology committee, Dinara Kutmanova, the auditors said.

At the beginning of August 2021, Kumtor provided Bolturuk with a company debit card, on which he managed to rack up expenses of around 7.5 million soms ($90,000) in four months. When Bolturuk took up the job helming Great Nomads Heritage, he continued using the Kumtor card. At one point he paid with the card for his whole family to travel to Toronto, at a cost of more than $12,000, the Audit Chamber said.

A business trip to attend a mining conference in London at the end of 2021 generated some unaccounted-for spending too. In addition to the cost of attending the forum, auditors say they believe Bolturuk spent a further 225,000 soms ($2,700) on unsanctioned extras, including the purchase of ten tickets to a show in London’s Dominion Theater, which is typically used as a venue for lavish musicals.

Bolturuk is furthermore said to have generously boosted his own salary. The monthly salary of the executive he displaced at Kumtor in mid-2021 was around $37,000. By August that year, Bolturuk was making more than $40,000 — a sum that would increase to $55,000 by the year’s end.

Bolturuk's lawyer, Kaysyn Abakirov, has responded to the Audit Chamber report with a demand for the Prosecutor General's Office and the State Committee for National Security, or GKNB, to initiate criminal procedures against the auditors. 

Abakirov said the Audit Chamber had undermined the principle of presumption of innocence and violated his client’s right to confidentiality by making its investigation public. The report was a "distortion of facts" engineered to denigrate Bolturuk in the eyes of the public, the lawyer said.

“One gets the impression that any government can use such materials from the Audit Chamber in their own interests, depending on the current situation and to obtain the desired results,” Abakirov wrote on Facebook.

Shortly after his dismissal from Great Nomads Heritage in September, Bolturuk and two of his underlings were detained on suspicion of financial misconduct. Prosecutors accuse him of causing the state damages worth around 1 billion soms (more than $11 million). 

While the Audit Chamber report may indeed ease the work of prosecutors once Bolturuk’s case goes to court, it hardly reflects well on President Japarov. It was the president who defied the warnings of his critics and went ahead with placing substantial financial levers in the hands of a long-time ally.

And it remains, furthermore, unclear what has brought about Bolturuk’s downfall. State investigators will claim it was corruption and mismanagement, although others will suggest it was the result of elite infighting.

With independent media, opposition politicians and anti-corruption NGOs coming under mounting pressure from the authorities, however, a shrinking number of people are likely to publicly advance the latter argument.