Uzbekistan’s business elite may soon be able to take a breather. The subjects of recently reported wide-scale corruption probes could have a shadowy savior.
Uzbekistan-based online news website Uzmetronom.uz has cited unnamed sources as saying that Tashkent city prosecutor Bakhriddin Valiyev was fired on May 19, although his dismissal cannot be confirmed.
As the site explains, the impetus for many of the “unwarranted arrests” of businessmen appeared to be coming from the Tashkent prosecutor’s office, and with Valiyev out of the way, things may be taking an upward turn for Uzbekistan’s hard-working plutocrats.
What is this witch-hunt for the Uzbek business community’s finest all about anyway?
The standard theory seems to be that the campaign has its roots in a President Islam Karimov speech late last year, when he demanded that there should “be no oligarchs in our country.”
Strange words for a man with a daughter worth more than half a billion dollars, but that is another story.
Apparently, Karimov thinks prosperity is all about the middle class and the small-time entrepreneur, as he explained in a speech on December 5 to mark the seventeenth anniversary of the Constitution (that’s the same Constitution that says you cannot run for president more than twice, by the way– Karimov has now run for president three times):
“Small business and entrepreneurship, just like in all developed countries of the world, are an important component of the process in the formation of a middle class of owners in Uzbekistan - the foundation and pillar of the country's sociopolitical life.
“Everything depends on the middle class in the whole world. Not on rich people, oligarchs, who made easy billions and deceive their nation today.”
(Uzbek First Channel, via BBC Monitoring, December 6.)
Yeah, boo, rich people, boo!
So, as Bruce Pannier explains in his comprehensive analysis, the round up of the latter-day kulak class may have begun:
They include the president of one of Tashkent's premier football clubs, the owner of the country's largest wholesale market, construction magnates, and bankers, according to media reports. Others with ties to big business have reportedly fled the country.
If it is true that Valiyev has anything to do with any of this, many will welcome his removal.
Many businessmen, that is.
The Russian-language, not to speak of the English-language media, throws up precious little about this fellow. Uzmetronom adds little more to what we already know (which is nothing), other than to cast aspersions on Uzbek prosecutors’ alleged susceptibility to palm-greasing and that the General Prosecutor will have to sign off on Valiyev’s dismissal.
What did it for Valiyev then? Has he been “bumped off” thanks to some usefully administered financial incentives? What role has he played in the judiciary’s pursuit of crooked business? Does his supposed exit from the scene spell at least the temporary end to this probity campaign?
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