A shadowy Uzbek agency with ties to the president’s household has been making an attempt to revive its dormant web site after a latest RFE/RL investigation revealed that it secured greater than $100 million in secret state gasoline offers regardless of having a nearly imperceptible public enterprise footprint.
An RFE/RL exposé revealed on April 25 discovered that Ultimo Group Restricted had quietly gained a young in 2021 to dealer a minimum of $36 million in overpriced pure gasoline to produce Uzbekistan’s largest state-owned cement plant on the time.
The investigation discovered that Ultimo Group, which gained a state contract simply over a month after its founding, had quite a few ties to an in depth confidant of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev’s son-in-law, Otabek Umarov, who serves as his deputy safety chief. .
The sudden and profitable emergence of Ultimo Group within the Uzbek gasoline sector was shocking partially as a result of the corporate was virtually unknown to the general public. didn’t have a purposeful web site.
However shortly after RFE/RL revealed its investigation, the Ultimo Group added firm emblem and content material to its web siteprimarily inventory pictures and some brief, out-of-date messages from over three years in the past.
The date listed for the oldest of those newly added information — March 11, 2021 — really predates the existence of the Ultimo Group web site, whose area was registered virtually a month later, on-line data present.
A lot of the information gadgets added to the location are now not than one paragraph and precisely mirror the headlines and articles revealed by the Uzbek information web site Gazeta.uz.
A newly added declare on the web site that Ultimo Group “provides pure gasoline to the Republic of Uzbekistan” and that its “enterprise pursuits primarily cowl the areas of Central Asia and Southeast Asia” seems to contradict feedback made by firm director Ravshan Mutalov per week in the past to RFE. /RL revealed its investigation.
“We have not been working for greater than a yr,” Mutalov answered by telephone when requested concerning the firm he works for within the gasoline sector. Mutalov declined to call the corporate or present additional particulars.
RFE/RL discovered no report of Ultimo Group’s industrial exercise past 2022.
The RFE/RL investigation additionally discovered that Ultimo Group obtained a minimum of $66 million in wire transfers from Uzbekistan’s state gasoline transit monopoly, Uztransgaz, beneath a gasoline contract whose particulars stay unclear.
Whereas Mirziyoev has repeatedly publicly known as for a crackdown on bribery and cronyism, anti-corruption watchdog Transparency Worldwide wrote in its newest evaluation of Uzbekistan that the gas-rich nation, Central Asia’s most populous, “stays a high-profile authoritarian state.” corruption, nepotism and abuse of energy.”
Mutalov is amongst a number of people and corporations in a cross-border community linked to Ultimo Group and Umarov, together with Umarov’s shut confidant, the top of the Uzbekistan Judo Federation, Azizjon Kamilov.
This community consists of a number of corporations within the United Arab Emirates that operated beneath the names Ultimo Group and Rushmore. Certainly one of these corporations, the United Arab Emirates-based Ultimo Group, was run by the British licensee of Umarov’s private sportswear model, 7Saber.
A key determine on this community based mostly within the United Arab Emirates is an Uzbek affiliate of Umarov and Kamilov named Doniyor Kadirov.
The brand new lifetime of Ultimo’s dormant web site wasn’t the one vital on-line change seen after RFE/RL’s investigation.
After its publication, Kadyrov quickly locked his Instagram account. When it grew to become public once more, the picture of him with Umarov and Kamilov was eliminated.
Kadyrov runs each the United Arab Emirates-based Ultimo Group FZCO and a number of other corporations working beneath the identify Rushmore, all utilizing the identical telephone quantity. The telephone quantity has been faraway from their web site following an RFE/RL investigation.
On April 29, RFE/RL known as two contact telephone numbers listed on the revamped web site of Tashkent-based Ultimo Group, which didn’t instantly reply to an emailed request for remark.
The automated messages mentioned the numbers had been out of service.