Nina Lesikhina is the Community Support Coordinator at CEE Bankwatch Network, a Prague-based environmental watchdog.
Ever since international financial institutions contributed to Uzbekistan’s Anti-Crisis Fund early in the pandemic, bloggers and activists in the country have warned that the Fund’s management lacks transparency and that more oversight is needed to prevent misuse and embezzlement.
Miraziz Bazarov was one of the first to sound the alarm. In July 2020, he wrote a public letter to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) – the biggest contributor, which loaned $600-million to the Fund – and the World Bank, urging them to stop providing aid until Tashkent establishes clear anti-corruption mechanisms and publishes a full accounting of how it is spending the money.
Bazarov was later publicly smeared and savagely beaten. He also faces criminal charges, apparently in retaliation for his activism.
Now we at Bankwatch can affirm Bazarov’s concerns about likely fraud.
Opaque spending
Bankwatch analyzed the limited data published by the Anti-Crisis Fund in August 2020. Though the lack of transparency makes it almost impossible to verify how Uzbekistan is spending the money meant to battle the coronavirus outbreak, our new report highlights several troubling trends that must be investigated.
For example, three companies allegedly affiliated with people close to Uzbekistan’s president and the mayor of Tashkent received the largest contracts for the construction of medical...
A British science journalist-turned-attorney who initiated a lawsuit that saw a Harvard University-affiliated cancer centre pay $15 million (11 million) to settle claims of alleged data misreprese...