Fugitive oligarch under pressure to turn himself in

    By Philip Baillie and Kirstin Ridley
    Fugitive oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov, accused of embezzling at least $5 billion (3.16 billion pounds) from his former Kazakh bank BTA, is under pressure to turn himself in within two weeks or risk being debarred from defending himself against fraud claims which rank among the biggest ever heard in Britain.
    BTA, now controlled by Kazakh sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna and which has launched nine fraud claims against Ablyazov, said in a court document published on Friday it believed he had fled Britain on a coach bound for France.
    "We are asking for one further chance to comply with the orders. To use a football metaphor, it is a yellow card not a red card," Stephen Smith, BTA's counsel, told the High Court. He noted that according to material he had received overnight from Ablyazov's legal team, they didn't know the whereabouts of their client either.
    In a move that underlines the determination with which BTA's legal team is pursuing Ablyazov, the bank urged judge Nigel Teare to allow Ablyazov until 4pm on March 2 to give himself up or remove his right to defence.
    It also asked for an order that Ablyazov be debarred from offering any defence to claims against him if he failed to fully divulge his assets by 4pm on March 9.
    "Suffice to say for present purposes that the bank currently understands that Mr Ablyazov has left the jurisdiction and travelled to France," BTA's lawyer Christopher Hardman said in a court document.
    "It is suspected that this was by coach and that he may have had the use of a passport that he failed to deliver up. It is not known whether he remains in France."
    Ablyazov, who fled to Britain after BTA was declared insolvent and nationalised in 2009, was sentenced to 22 months in jail last week for contempt of court in what was expected to be a sideshow to the main fraud claims due to be heard in court from November.
    But the 48-year-old billionaire, who denies the charges he says are designed to rob him of his assets and silence him as an opponent to Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, failed to attend court last week.
    His London-based spokesman, who has said he has been unable to reach Ablyazov since last week's hearing, declined to comment.
    Ablyazov's counsel has argued that BTA has long attempted to "knock out" their client, who was granted political asylum in Britain in 2011 and says he has received a death threat and hate mail while here.
    BTA's claims against Ablyazov and his associates range from allegations that bank loans were diverted into shell companies for Ablyazov's benefit, to the purchase of a non-existent oil platform.
    Ablyazov, who was sentenced to jail last week for dealing with assets in breach of a worldwide freezing order, failing to disclose his interest in a British Virgin Islands company and for lying on oath about his ownership of UK properties and other offshore companies, may be again attempting to transfer assets, BTA said.
    
    Chain of companies
    The bank said it understood that documents had been filed on February 14 with Ukrainian authorities seeking to re-register ownership of shares in Ukrainian companies, through which Ablyazov indirectly holds his stakes in BTA Ukraine, in the names of newly-incorporated Belize companies.
    Judge Teare has said Ablyazov appears to control his assets via a chain of companies using trusted nominees and holding companies often registered in offshore jurisdictions.
    Ablyazov, a former Kazakh government minister and one of the country's richest businessmen, has argued that the elaborate way in which he controls his assets has been necessary to protect him from his enemies.
    He was imprisoned in Kazakhstan 2002, a year after his "increasing disenchantment" with Nazarbayev's authoritarian rule prompted him to found the pro-business opposition party Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan.
    Pardoned a year later, he spent two years in exile in Russia before returning to Kazakhstan under an amnesty with Nazarbayev to lead BTA from 2005 until 2009, when he fled to London after Samruk-Kazyna took control.
    The nationalisation triggered a clause in the bank's debt contracts allowing creditors to ask for early repayment. BTA then defaulted on around $12 billion of debt.
    Creditors such as RBS, Barclays, Standard Chartered and HSBC as well as a host of international peers and bondholders were forced to write down around $7.0 billion in a high-profile restructuring in 2010.
    But last month, just 18 months after the 66 percent debt haircut, the bank defaulted again -- this time on a $160 million coupon payment.
    The move enraged bondholders, who were expecting sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna, which controls assets worth $80 billion, to back the bank and sparked warnings that the reputation of Kazakhstan would be damaged in the eyes of foreign investors.
    Nazabayev has imposed bold market reforms and attracted at least $120 billion in foreign investment during his 20-year rule. The country, confident enough to put forward central bank head Grigory Marchenko as a candidate to lead the IMF last year, counts former British premier Tony Blair among its advisers.
    But deadly clashes in the western oil region of Mangistau -- Kazakhstan's most violent unrest in decades -- have cast a shadow over an officially cultivated image of stability in a country in which dissent is treated harshly, Reuters said.