On Thursday, the federal prosecutor in Switzerland said that it has filed an accusation against the daughter of Uzbekistan’s former president, accusing her of taking bribes and running a criminal organization known as “The Office”.
The daughter of Islam Karimov, the former president of Uzbekistan – who ruled Uzbekistan from 1991 to 2016 – Gulnara Karimova – is charged with running the operation which allegedly funneled millions of dollars worth of bribes from telecom firms.
She refuses the allegations.
Money was channeled through bank accounts in several nations before being transferred to Swiss accounts, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) said.
The OAG said, “The beneficial owners of these bank accounts were ‘men of straw’, thereby concealing the fact that Gulnara Karimova was the true beneficiary.”
Immense sums were involved, with more than 340 million Swiss francs ($370 million) already seized to be returned to Uzbekistan.
More than 440 million francs of assets stay under confiscation in the proceedings against Karimova and another charge, a former general director of the Uzbek subsidiary of a Russian telecoms company not named in the accusation.
Karimova was once a successful businesswoman and her nation’s United Nations representative in Geneva.
She is now in jail in Uzbekistan, after being imprisoned in 2019 for violating the terms of her house arrest after obtaining a five-year sentence in 2015 on accusations of embezzlement and extortion.
Her Swiss lawyer Gregoire Mangeat said that Karimova challenged the charges and will oppose her acquittal.
He told Reuters, “The criminal organization theory is disputed. It was pulled out of a hat by the Swiss Prosecutors only a year ago, 10 years after the start of their investigation.”
The OAG said that from at least 2001 until 2013, Karimova ran a criminal organization known as “The Office”, including several dozen people and a large number of firms that ran its criminal movements as a professional business, while also resorting to violence and intimidation.
The indictment said that foreign firms that expected to work in Uzbekistan’s telecoms sector had to bribe Karimova, who “exploited her dual status as the daughter of the president and as an Uzbek public official”, giving her unlimited influence.
The case has been filed with the Swiss Federal Criminal Court.
