Voice of Democracy
Published by Kazakhstan 21st Century Foundation · Washington, D.C. ·Sept. 11, 2002

U.S. JUDGE SLAPS DOWN NAZARBAYEV ­Nursultan Nazarbayev is used to telling judges and courts what to do, not the other way around. But this time a federal judge in Manhattan rejected the protests and objections of the Kazakh dictator and ordered thousands of documents handed over to a New York grand jury investigating Nazarbayev and some his cronies for bribery. Prosecutors also are looking at his American consultant, James Giffen, for allegedly funneling millions of dollars in payoffs to Nazarbayev and other top Kazakh officials, reports the New York Daily News. On Monday a Manhattan federal judge ordered 300,000 pages of documents be given to prosecutors. The judge declared "a foreign government that is alleged to be a recipient of bribes from an American corporation cannot be permitted to bring a grand jury investigation to a halt." The Daily News called the judge's order "a first-of-its-kind ruling on a 'sovereign immunity' claim concerning production of subpoenaed documents." Investigators suspect Giffen deposited $60 million in payoffs from oil companies into Swiss bank accounts of Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials. Nazarbayev recently admitted keeping a secret $1-billion Swiss bank account, but insisted it was government money, not personal. Swiss authorities are conducting a separate investigation of the dictator's dealings. http://www.nydailynews.com/

THE TRUTH CAN BE PAINFUL ­ If the report in yesterday's New York Daily News had been published in a Kazakh newspaper, there's a very good chance that the publisher, editors and reporters would be in the hospital or a jail cell today and their offices in shambles. That has been the experience of Kazakh publications and broadcasters that have published news that displeases the government, particularly reports about the international investigations of bribery and corruption in the Nazarbayev regime. Reporters have been brutally beaten, arrested, persecuted and prosecuted. A favorite criminal charge is "insulting the president." And in a corrupt and brutal dictatorship like Kazakhstan, unlike in a democracy, the truth is no defense; in fact, it is usually the reason for tougher prosecution. Sergei Duvanov, one of the country's most prominent journalists and editor of a human rights bulletin, last month wound up in a hospital intensive care ward after writing -- accurately -- about the dictator's secret Swiss bank accounts. Many governments, including the United States, and international organizations have repeatedly condemned the violent Kazak crackdown on the media, but Nazarbayev has merely shrugged them off. Newspapers and radio and television stations have been vandalized, firebombed and padlocked; presses and computers confiscated or destroyed; journalists harassed, beaten, hauled into tax court, jailed and even driven to exile. http://eurasia.org.ru/2000/

KAZAKH LOBBYING BID FLOPS -- Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev's high level Washington lobbying campaign to block a federal bribery investigation targeting him has failed. His lawyers and diplomats went to the State Department and other federal agencies to pressure the U.S. Justice Department and a federal judge to protect him from a Manhattan grand jury probe, according to the New York Law Journal. But U.S. District Judge Denny Chin rejected Nazarbayev's claims of executive privilege and sovereign immunity, at the request of the prosecutors. He dismissed a ruling by Nazarbayev's Justice Ministry that the subpoenaed documents could not be removed from Kazakhstan and that they constitute state secrets. Judge Chin said U.S. law, not Kazakh law, governs the case, and since the Kazakh government was suspected of taking bribes from an American corporation, it could not block a U.S. grand jury investigation by refusing to cooperate. "The interest of the United States in enforcing its criminal laws outweighs any difficulties" that Nazarbayev or the other suspects may have in complying with the subpoena. Nazarbayev, his American advisor James Giffen and other Kazakh officials are the center of a two-year-old investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and the International Anti-Bribery and Fair Competition Act of 1998, banning the bribery of foreign officials to obtain business. Judge Chin said he was unimpressed by lawyers' arguments that disclosure might embarrass or anger either government. http://www6.law.com/ny/

For the full stories, see the web citations above or contact us at News@Kazakhstan21.org. The Kazakhstan 21st Century Foundation promotes democracy and human rights in Kazakhstan through public affairs and educational programs in the United States and Europe. This material is distributed by Kazakhstan 21st Century Foundation. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice,  Washington, D.C.