Uzbekistan’s state-owned mining giant Almalyk Mining-Metallurgical Complex (AMMC) has awarded more than $200 million in procurement tenders to 10 foreign firms whose ownership and business activity are murky, including companies that reported themselves as “dormant” or “inactive,” OCCRP and Finance Uncovered reported.
Several of the foreign firms can be linked to two figures: Grigoriy Khvan, a prominent official in Uzbekistan’s table-tennis world, and Felipe Guerrero, a Colombian national with no identifiable mining background, according to the news outlets.
Two UK firms that have won tens of millions of dollars in tenders with AMMC have no prior record of working in the mining industry, OCCRP said. One of the UK firms is owned on paper by a British bookkeeper in his 70s who has no ties to Central Asia and the other is owned on paper by a UK corporate services provider, according to the news outlets.
Following inquiries from reporters late last year, the British firms retroactively named Khvan and Guerrero as “persons of significant control” in records filed to Companies House, the UK registry of corporate beneficial owners. First, the firms named Khvan as their owner in records backdated to 2018 and then said Guerrero was their owner, backdated to the same year, OCCRP said.
The legal entities also declared themselves as “dormant” during periods in which they were awarded tens of millions of dollars in tenders from AMMC, according to the report, which cited similar anomalies in other jurisdictions.
In a decree last April, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev included AMMC among a raft of state-owned companies that is slated for privatization, according to OCCRP, which also noted that Mirziyoyev has underscored the need for transparency during the privatization process.
But awarding major state contracts to firms with little to no background in what they are tasked to do will only undercut Mirziyoyev’s transparency pledge, Ben Cowdock of Transparency International UK told OCCRP.
“There’s also a danger around contracted companies being owned in the shadows by politically connected individuals, who again might not be well equipped to deliver and might just be using this as a scheme to take money out of a state-owned company,” Cowdock said in the report.
Read more at OCCRP