Gold, Power and an Oligarch’s Grievance: The Battle That Haunts Kazakhstan’s Old Order

Dinmukhamet Idrisov says he surrendered a valuable gold-mining interest after coming under pressure during a criminal investigation. The extraordinary dispute that followed offers a glimpse into the blurred boundaries between money, law and power in Kazakhstan’s recent past.

In November 2018, Dinmukhamet Idrisov had a problem that even immense wealth could not easily solve.

One of Kazakhstan’s richest businessmen was being repeatedly questioned by prosecutors over a commercial dispute dating back more than a decade. According to the account Idrisov would later give, weeks of interrogations had left him fearing arrest. He said he was approaching a nervous breakdown.

Then came an agreement.

Idrisov and other shareholders transferred interests in AltynEx Company, a gold producer operating in Kazakhstan’s Aktobe region, as part of a settlement of claims arising from an unsuccessful property venture in Almaty.

The criminal investigation was closed shortly afterwards because authorities found no criminal event.

For several years, the episode seemed destined to join the vast collection of opaque business settlements produced during Kazakhstan’s first three decades of independence.

Instead, Idrisov came back.

He claimed he had been forced into an extraordinarily disadvantageous transaction. What followed was a sprawling legal battle involving some of Kazakhstan’s wealthiest businessmen, prosecutors, corporate structures, forensic psychologists and a gold asset whose value dwarfed the debt it was supposed to settle.

At its centre lies a question with implications well beyond Idrisov himself.

Was this simply a brutal commercial dispute between oligarchs? Or does it reveal something deeper about how business was conducted in the Kazakhstan that the country’s present leadership now says it wants to leave behind?

It Started With a Property Development

The origins of the confrontation are considerably less glamorous than gold.

In 2007, companies connected to Idrisov and his business counterparts entered into arrangements for a large residential development in Almaty.

The financial crisis intervened.

Plans changed. A proposed residential complex was reconceived as a shopping centre. More money moved between associated companies. The project ultimately failed.

Then came years of litigation.

Companies linked to the dispute sought more than 81bn tenge and a valuable plot of land in central Almaty. Idrisov maintained that he had left one of the companies involved before some of the crucial transactions took place and should not personally be responsible for its obligations.

The dispute was already complicated enough.

Then, in November 2018, it entered the criminal justice system.

Valikhan Koshumbaïev, then director general of BSB, filed a complaint concerning former officials of Idrisov’s Ordabasy corporation. Idrisov was questioned in the resulting criminal case as a witness with the right to defence; another former executive was identified as the principal suspect.

That distinction is important. Idrisov was not convicted of a crime. He was not ultimately prosecuted.

But he says he believed something much worse was coming.

“Business or Freedom?”

Idrisov later alleged that investigators subjected him to intense psychological pressure.

He described repeated interrogations and confrontations and said he had been led to believe that he could be arrested. According to reporting by the Kazakh newspaper Vremya, he later characterised the decision confronting him as effectively one between his business and his freedom.

On 27 November 2018, a mediation agreement was signed.

Koshumbaïev represented BSB. Idrisov was another party, alongside MAG Corporation.

The financial architecture of the settlement was remarkable.

BSB had claims exceeding 81.4bn tenge. Under the agreement, Idrisov accepted responsibility for approximately 22.7bn tenge, to be satisfied through 123,333 shares in AltynEx Company held by several shareholders. BSB abandoned the remainder of its claims, including its attempt to obtain the disputed Almaty land.

The gold shares subsequently passed through a series of owners.

The criminal investigation, meanwhile, was terminated on 7 December 2018 because investigators found no criminal event.

That sequence became the foundation of Idrisov’s later case.

His contention was simple and explosive: the prospect of imprisonment had been used to force an immensely valuable business asset out of his hands.

The people and companies on the other side have contested the characterization of the transaction as coerced.

The Price of Gold

There was another striking feature of the agreement: the apparent difference between the debt and the value of the asset.

Idrisov’s lawyers cited an independent valuation putting AltynEx at more than 175bn tenge. The debt addressed through the settlement was about 23bn.

Kazakhstan Stock Exchange figures cited by Vremya showed that the company subsequently distributed more than 36bn tenge in dividends in 2021 and 2022 alone.

For Idrisov, the disparity supported his argument that the deal was unconscionably disadvantageous.

But it also created an uncomfortable question.

Why had a sophisticated billionaire, surrounded by advisers and operating at the highest levels of Kazakhstan’s business world, agreed to it?

Idrisov’s answer was coercion.

The courts eventually went searching inside his mind for evidence.

Putting a Billionaire on the Psychiatrist’s Couch

The subsequent proceedings took an extraordinary turn.

When Idrisov sought to invalidate the settlement and recover 32,190 AltynEx shares, the court ordered forensic experts to examine his psychological state at the time of the transactions.

The questions were unusually direct.

Had Idrisov suffered moral or psychological pressure? Had investigators used methods inconsistent with Kazakhstan’s law? Could the interrogations have prevented him from expressing his genuine intentions freely?

Experts were also asked whether there had been psychological violence, torture or degrading treatment.

A psychologist subsequently requested a combined psychological and psychiatric assessment to determine whether Idrisov had suffered from a chronic or temporary mental disorder.

It is difficult to imagine a more vivid metaphor for Kazakhstan’s attempt to reckon with its recent economic history: a billionaire asking a court to reconstruct his state of mind while signing away a gold company under the shadow of prosecutors.

Yet the dispute is not merely colourful oligarch theatre.

It exposes a genuine institutional problem.

The Ghost of Old Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s current political leadership frequently distinguishes between the country it is trying to build and the system that preceded it.

The latter has become known, sometimes officially, as “Old Kazakhstan”: a period associated with concentrated wealth, politically connected monopolies and institutions that critics say were too readily available to powerful interests.

Idrisov was hardly an outsider to that world.

He became enormously wealthy within it. His companies operated across construction, infrastructure, utilities and natural resources. His adversaries were themselves members of Kazakhstan’s business elite.

That makes the morality of the AltynEx affair unusually complicated.

There is no David here.

The story involves immensely wealthy people fighting over immensely valuable assets. But precisely for that reason, it may reveal more about the old system than a simpler confrontation between citizen and state.

The central allegation is that criminal justice became entangled with a civil commercial dispute.

In 2022, prosecutors revisited the underlying criminal case and again closed it because of the absence of a criminal event. Idrisov then embarked on his attempt to undo the transactions.

His lawsuit targeted not merely the original agreement but subsequent share sales, transfers and gifts. He asked for shares to be recovered and registered back in his name.

The effort raises a second problem for the “New Kazakhstan”.

If transactions produced by questionable practices of the past can never be revisited, reform risks becoming rhetorical.

But if every powerful businessman can reopen old agreements by alleging that the previous system was unfair, legal certainty becomes equally elusive.

That tension may ultimately matter more than which oligarch ends up with the gold.

When the Powerful Ask for the Rule of Law

There is something paradoxical about Dinmukhamet Idrisov’s position.

A businessman who prospered under Kazakhstan’s old economic order is now invoking the principles that the country’s reformers say should replace it: due process, limits on prosecutorial power, protection of property and independence of the courts.

His wealth does not invalidate those principles.

Nor does it prove his account of coercion.

What it does is turn the AltynEx affair into an unusually difficult test of reform.

The rule of law is easiest to celebrate when it protects sympathetic victims. It becomes harder when it must adjudicate between billionaires, reconstruct opaque transactions and decide whether institutions once served as instruments in battles among the elite.

Valikhan Koshumbaïev’s 2018 complaint, the investigation that followed, the mediation agreement, the rapid closure of the criminal case and Idrisov’s later attempt to reclaim his shares form a sequence whose meaning remains contested.

Each side can construct a different story from it.

For Idrisov, it is the story of a business taken under pressure.

For his opponents, it is a settlement that a powerful businessman later decided he wanted undone.

For Kazakhstan, however, the question is broader.

The country says it wants to escape a political economy in which wealth, personal influence and state power could become dangerously intertwined.

The AltynEx saga demonstrates how difficult that escape can be.

Old Kazakhstan did not disappear when a new political vocabulary arrived. Its contracts remain. Its fortunes remain. Its rivalries remain. And the businessmen who learned to prosper within it remain powerful enough to ask the new system to judge the old one.

The real measure of reform will not be which billionaire wins.

It will be whether the answer can finally be determined by institutions rather than influence.