HY RU EN
Asset 3

Loading

End of content No more pages to load

Your search did not match any articles

Uzbekistan: First Daughter Investigated For Money Laundering

Swiss authorities are investigating Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, for money laundering.

The Swiss public prosecutor’s office said it has expanded its original investigations into four people linked to the Karimovs into the “possible irregularities” in Uzbekistan's telecommunications marketreports Reuters.

First daughter Gulnara Karimova

So far, authorities have frozen more than US $910 million related to the investigation.

Karimova, a 41-year-old businesswoman whose pop star stage name is "Googosha,” was the Uzbek ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from December 2008 until last year. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

According to BBC, Karimova has been under investigation by Swiss authorities since September 2013, and her villa outside of Geneva was searched just weeks after she lost her diplomatic immunity.

In 2012, a Swedish TV report accused the Swedish companyTeliaSonera of paying an intermediary company US$300 million for 3G mobile phone rights in Uzbekistan. TeliaSonera denied any wrongdoing.

The Swiss authorities did not name TeliaSonera in their statement, reports BBC, but they did say their Swedish colleagues were conducting a corruption inquiry into a Swedish enterprise in the Uzbek telecommunications industry. 

TeliaSonera told BBC that they are cooperating with the Swedish prosecutor’s investigations.

Karimova, who denied involvement in the TeliaSonera case a few months ago, could not be reached for comment.

Uzbekistan, a former Soviet nation located in central Asia, is ruled by President Karimov with an iron fist.

In 2012, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project named him the “Person of the Year,” citing his family’s corrupt grip on the country’s largest banking, construction, and telecom businesses.

https://reportingproject.net

Write a comment

Hetq does not publish comments containing offensive language or personal attacks. Please criticize content, not people. And please use "real" names, not monikers. Thanks again for following Hetq.
If you found a typo you can notify us by selecting the text area and pressing CTRL+Enter