It appears one cannot be a self-respecting Central Asian leader's child these days without owning a successful football club.
This time round, it’s the turn of the son of Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rakhmon, Rustam Emomali, who has led his Istiqol football team to its first-ever championship title this weekend after beating second-placed Regar-TadAZ.
Emomali is nothing if not busy and versatile. On top of founding Istiqol (“Independence”), he also plays as an attacker for the Dushanbe-based club and became deputy president of the football federation at the start of the month.
On top of all these sporting achievements, all accomplished at the tender age of 22, Emomali is also the head of a government entrepreneurship-promotion agency and the Youth Union of Tajikistan, a successor to the Soviet-era Komsomol youth league.
In his capacity as a business-boosting guru, state television showed Emomali in July handing over two new houses to flood victims in disaster-stricken southern Tajikistan. It is not clear how that was meant to support entrepreneurs other than Emomali, whose investments Tajik state television said bankrolled the building work.
As Rakhmon’s eldest son, Emomali is viewed as a promising successor. Unfortunately, Article 65 of the constitution bars him from being nominated for office until he turns 35, at which point his father will be a venerable 71 years old. As the same article states that only a citizen up to the age of 65 can run for the country’s top post, something may have to give somewhere.
Actually, until he turns 25, Emomali cannot even sit in the national parliament. He was elected to the Dushanbe City Council earlier this year.
All this sporting success could be a harbinger of doom though. Deposed Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s son, Maxim, is reported to own a share in English Premier League football team Blackpool, which is doing surprisingly well this season, despite being widely tipped for instant relegation. But what consolation is that to poor Maxim, who lives in exile in the United Kingdom?
And in Uzbekistan, once-booming Bunyodkor used to enjoy the largesse of Swiss-registered Zeromax, a company believed to have had links with President Islam Karimov’s sultry daughter, Gulnara. But with Zeromax apparently going down the tubes amid soaring debts, the club’s top stars have defected and left Bunyodkor a pale shadow of its former self.
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