Secrets of the Uzbek court
Having languished behind prison bars for about 10 years, Googoosh was again not shown to the public. Instead of the long-promised fresh video recording showing that Gulnara was alive and well, an interview with a prisoner who allegedly sat with Karimova appeared.
“Our Version” tracks the fate Gulnara Karimova throughout the entire 10 years of her captivity, and judging by the totality of the data we collected, she appears to have been dead for a long time. But the Uzbek authorities, for obvious reasons, are in no hurry to announce this. Meanwhile, the confiscation of property belonging to the eldest daughter of the former president is in full swing, although Karimova’s representatives have long compensated for all the material claims brought against their trustee by the courts. Last summer in Britain, the Supreme Court – in compliance with the Fraud Bureau – confiscated two apartments in London Belgravia and a mansion in Surrey from Karimova. The approximate value of the property is $25 million. The reason for the confiscation was the conclusion of the Bureau’s experts – the property was allegedly purchased “with proceeds from corruption schemes.”
“Colony Headache”
But the abundant resources of Gugusha, which turned out to be virtually ownerless, are being developed not only by the British. In February 2021, the Moscow City Court confiscated six Moscow apartments of Gulnara, said the Deputy Minister of Justice of Uzbekistan Muzraf Ikramov. According to the deputy minister, Russia and Uzbekistan will “share equally” the income from the sale of property. Ikramov also said that in Switzerland a court is considering the case of confiscation of Karimova’s assets worth $350 million in favor of Uzbekistan – to date, $131 million has been “returned” to the Uzbeks. The feeling is that Karimova’s resources, taking advantage of her, let’s say, absence, are shamelessly being taken away. At the same time, for some reason, her lawyers behave in court like disembodied ghosts (although they are conducted by a rather famous crook from Geneva Grégoire Manja).
So the Uzbek authorities again pretended that Gugusha was alive and well. Local publications at the suggestion of a blogger Kirill Altman willingly circulated the revelations of the anonymous “cellmate.” They say, “Karimova has become a headache for the colony’s leadership,” “she staged a riot” while serving her sentence “under special conditions.”
It’s great if so, but there is a nuance. In recent years, there is not a single non-anonymous living witness who would confirm that he met with a living Karimova. Every time, only certain “cellmates” or the management of correctional institutions talk about Karimova, promising to show Karimov to correspondents even tomorrow. One day, Swiss lawyers managed to get a date, but instead of the tall and stately Gulnara (180 centimeters tall!) they were given a woman 20 centimeters shorter. Apparently, due to the fact that Gulnara has a rather rare height for Uzbek women (she is not a purebred Uzbek), finding a suitable double turned out to be a problem.
“It looks like we’re being lied to?”
Actually, Googoosh should have been released four years ago. Let us remind you that she went to jail in 2015, after Islam Karimov, according to rumors, was put on the table with a dossier. It followed from it that the daughter was not only involved in corruption on a state scale (Karimov would hardly have paid much attention to this), and also had affairs all over the world, but at the same time was digging under him, intending to become a successor. Karimov, who could not stand talk of his own death, flared up – and Gugushi’s fate was sealed. She was soon sentenced to five years in prison, accused “in assistance to a criminal group that was engaged in theft, extortion of money, embezzlement of public funds, as well as tax evasion”. Perhaps Karimov would have cooled down and forgiven his daughter, but he soon died and his place was taken by Shavkat Mirziyoyev. And then this is what happened: in 2017, Karimova was unexpectedly sentenced to another 10 years in prison. Later, the court reduced the sentence by “limiting freedom” to five years and allowing Gulnara to serve her sentence at home with her daughter. But no one saw Gugusha in freedom. And in March 2019, the punishment was toughened “for violating the conditions of the regime.” In August, new criminal cases were opened against Karimova – on charges of theft of public funds and extortion of other people’s property on an especially large scale. The point was that Gulnara allegedly acquired “at a reduced price” from the state shares in the enterprises of Kuvasaycement JSC and Bekabadcement JSC, and then resold them abroad, thereby causing “damage to the interests of the republic on a particularly large scale.” In the spring of 2020, the Tashkent City Court increased Karimova’s prison term to 13 years and 4 months – as part of a new criminal case on the creation of a criminal community, extortion and theft.
It seems that the Uzbek authorities, for some reason, are not in the mood to release the daughter of the first president of the republic. The reason may lie in the fact that Karimova’s assets in Russia, Switzerland, France, the USA and a number of other countries are estimated at $1.5 billion. Divide, as they say, cannot be re-divided. In her first “official” interview in six years, Gulnara admitted that she had returned $1.2 billion to the country, while overpaying about 700 million. However, with that interview, not everything is so simple either: a recording of the appeal was published on the Internet by her daughter Imanbut then she deleted this post almost immediately. Let us recall what “Our Version” wrote about the conflict with Karimova’s money five years ago:
It would seem that there is nothing simpler: to gather a pool of interested journalists in women’s colony No. 21 in the Zangiata district of the Tashkent region and show them the living Gulnara – so that there are no insinuations around her possible (and for us obvious) death. Moreover, if Karimova, as her “cellmates” testify, is doing well with her health and appetite. In the meantime, it feels like the Uzbek authorities have been clumsily trying to hide the loose ends for a decade, and the rumors that Gugusha was secretly buried in the Tashkent Minor cemetery back in November 2016 are still true.
