With elections to Kyrgyzstan’s ever-volatile parliament just a year away, it is an uneasy time to be a private businessman in the Central Asian country. According to managers at one of the country’s most popular media outlets, the pre-election shakedown has begun.

 

As politicians prepare for the 2015 ballot, the competition over votes and the resources necessary to secure them is expected to be intense. One way of fundraising is to turn to the time-honored tradition of corporate raids – raiderstvo in Russian – at key moments in the political calendar. Now Vechernii Bishkek, a profitable media outlet whose Russian-language newspaper has a weekly circulation of over 50,000 copies, is claiming that it has fallen victim to a raid from “people close to President [Almazbek] Atambayev.”

 

Vechernii Bishkek’s ownership structure is complicated. In 2000, the paper – and, significantly, its wholly owned print house – fell into the hands of Adil Toygonbaev, the son-in-law of then-President Askar Akayev. Toygonbaev secured a 50-percent stake in the holding company from one of its two owners before reportedly expropriating it entirely in a move that simultaneously relieved his family’s regime of the paper’s critical reporting and added the country's best-selling Russian-language newspaper to the family's list of assets.

After the Akayevs were overthrown in 2005, a local court gave control to one of the former owners, Alexander Kim. Nearly a decade later Kim’s former partner is now claiming that Toygonbaev never paid for his stake and that he still owns the 50 percent, a position Vechernii Bishkek’s editors say is being pushed by venal and ambitious figures in Atambayev’s government. Earlier this month, a district court ruled to take half of the business away from Kim. Vechernii Bishkek’s management, which is appealing the decision, has been careful not to allege that Atambayev himself is directly behind the raid.

 

Given Kyrgyzstan’s lousy record of respecting private property rights and a struggling economy facing certain energy crisis this winter, Vechernii Bishkek is unlikely to be the only business under pressure. For starters, Andrei Grozin, head of the Central Asia Department at the Institute for Countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Moscow, thinks further political conflict surrounding the Kumtor gold mine – Kyrgyzstan’s biggest cash cow of all – is likely as the ballot draws nearer. At least, Grozin told Stan Radar, he expects the mine’s Canadian owner, Centerra Gold – which is engaged in a protracted legal battle over control of the mine with the Kyrgyz government – to face “unofficial requests to finance party campaigns.”

 

Aside from expropriations, the buildup to the 2015 parliamentary vote poses another type of risk, too: an uptick in populist initiatives in the legislature.

 

In recent weeks, Felix Kulov, a Russified former prime minister who struggles to articulate himself in Kyrgyz, has suggested renaming the country Kyrgyz Eli—which could translate as the Republic of the Kyrgyz People and further alienate the country’s estranged minorities. Perhaps most alarmingly, Bakyt Torobaev, the head of a parliamentary sub-faction called Progress, has sponsored a bill that would arm Kyrgyz civilians living in disputed border zones abutting Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.