Residence of the daughter of the ex-president of Kazakhstan on 64 acres fenced in Megeve for €30 million

Megeve is a small town at the foot of the Alps in South-Eastern France with a population of only 3 thousand people. It is considered the most respectable winter resort in the country. Our regular readers are familiar with this location from the publication about the assets of the first deputy director of the Nursultan Nazarbayev Education Fund Svetlana Murzabekova. There she owns a three-room apartment in the Eskape Residence complex worth €1.67 million. Very close to Murzabekova’s apartments, in neighboring Switzerland, are the famous properties of her boss – Bellerive Castlewhich is owned by the director of the Nursultan Nazarbayev Education Foundation Dinara Kulibaeva and her husband Timur.

As Access to the Sea found out, the inhabitants of Bellerive Castle love winter sports and the purest mountain air no less than their subordinates. The Alpine residence of Dinara Kulibayeva, the middle daughter of former President Nazarbayev, is located in the same town of Megeve.

In 2016, Dinara, through her Luxembourg company Regulus Holdings SA, together with the former top manager of the family holding Almex and the ex-owner of the brokerage company SkyBridge Invest Adl Eskindirov, founded the company La Pomme D’or (The Golden Apple) in France. Moreover, financier Eskindirov received only a share of €100 out of the €50 thousand authorized capital in the newly created company. He was probably brought into the case so that he could represent La Pomme D’or, while the real beneficiaries remained in the shadows.

Judging by the company documents available to Access to the Sea, in 2017 Regulus Holdings SA opened a credit line of €22 million (almost 11 billion tenge at the current rate) at 2% per annum for its actual French subsidiary. La Pomme D’or immediately used this money to purchase a residence for Dinara Kulibayeva. It is located in Megeve at Impasse des Pastoureaux, 171. The residence includes a huge plot of 64 acres by local standards, a main chalet with an indoor pool and a caretaker’s house.

The residence of Dinara Kulibayeva stands out noticeably from the surrounding houses – it is surrounded by an impressive fence. For some reason, the idea of ​​doing the same did not occur to her neighbors.

Judging by aggregator data, since 2016, real estate prices in this region have increased by an average of 40%, so the current price of Dinara’s residence could now be about €30 million (almost 15 billion tenge), which makes it one of the most expensive in the portfolio Kulibayev family. For example, chalets with a plot area four times smaller than the plot of Nazarbayev’s daughter and with less living space are now being sold for €10-12 million. And without a fence!

An hour’s drive from Dinara Kulibayeva’s winter residence is the villa of another person associated with their family, now the former deputy prosecutor general who oversaw the process of returning assets illegally transferred abroad to the country, Ulan Baizhanov. A significant part of his biography, in addition to his work in the law enforcement agency, is associated with senior positions in the state-owned KazMunayGas and the Samruk-Kazyna Foundation, where he worked under the supervision of Timur Kulibayev. Baizhanov is still trying to sell this property, but so far without much success.

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At the end of last year, the company of Svetlana Ugai and her son declared a deal to purchase a three-room apartment in Eskape Residence for €1.67 million. This is almost 800 million tenge at the exchange rate at the beginning of this year. The money was paid in cash, without borrowing funds or mortgages.

The apartment is located on the second floor of the building under the letter “S” and consists of a hall, a kitchen-living room, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a toilet and two balconies. The residential premises are accompanied by one underground garage (it is a garage, not a parking space – you can look at renderings of the project) and a ski locker in the common area for residents of the complex.

Exactly the same apartment – and it is possible that the apartment of our heroes – is now rented at an average price of €10 thousand per week. This is approximately 4 million tenge per week or 19 million tenge per month. Real luxury housing.

By the way, we did not find such prices in Kazakhstan. A comparable amount (€12 thousand) was mentioned in its investigation by the Kazakh project protenge.kz. But there they were talking about renting a villa for a Kazakh diplomat, the amount included renting a company car and money for hospitality expenses. So who are these people who own apartments in the Alps worth almost 1 billion tenge? Let’s talk.

Judging by the list of affiliated persons of the Kazakh-British Technical University (part of the portfolio of assets of the Nursultan Nazarbayev Educational Foundation), the birth dates of Svetlana Ugai and Svetlana Murzabekova, as well as the data of “their son” Yesengerey Bolatov, completely coincide. There is no doubt that Ugai and Murzabekova are the same person. It can be assumed that in the French documents Svetlana decided to change her last name to a less recognizable one for the sake of conspiracy, but, frankly speaking, this did not help her much.

Svetlana Murzabekova leads a private lifestyle; it is difficult to call her a media person. In addition to working with Dinara Kulibaeva, she heads the Kazakhstan Project Management Association, and is also on the board of KBTU and IITU.

Svetlana’s husband, President of the Archery, Crossbow and Darts Federation Almaz Murzabekov, managed to work in quasi-state structures. He was vice-president of JSC Zheldorstroy, RSE Kazakhstan Temir Zholy and head of the representative office of the Russian transport company UniTrans in Kazakhstan. Little is also known about their son Yesengerey Bolatov.

The most media person in the family is the daughter of Aigeliya Murzabekov. In some articles Aigelia is represented sister Olympic champion Denis Ten, killed in Almaty, in others – simply family friend.

Aigelia has been living in Geneva for many years, at number 2 on Avenue des Bude. Not far from her are the possessions of her mother’s boss – the Castle of Bellerive Dinara and Timur Kulibaev.

In Geneva, Aigelia organized an event agency that works with large customers not only in the confederation itself, but also in Kazakhstan. She told reporters about debut of his ballet production “The Great Gatsby” at EXPO 2017 in Astana. According to her, the performance became possible because “someone recommended me, someone came and watched, someone spoke well about Gatsby.”

Let us recall that Aigelia was married to Yerzhan Nurgozhaev, the older brother of Galimzhan Yesenov, now the former son-in-law of Akhmetzhan Yesimov, then the chairman of the board of the joint stock company “National Company “Astana EXPO – 2017””. By the way, Aigelia’s ex-husband is also a big fan of France. As we already toldErzhan Nurgozhaev and his mother Shagizat Yesenova own a villa worth at least €6 million on the “billionaires’ peninsula” on the Cote d’Azur.

It is not for nothing that at the beginning of the text we mentioned the criminal case of theft at the International University of Information Technologies. In April last year, journalist Mikhail Kazachkov mentioned Svetlana Murzabekova among the defendants in this case in his detailed analysis. Then she had to testify and explain to the investigation the source of her capital. In Kazachkov’s text, she was also mentioned among the founders of the International Business University LLP (this university is now part of the Nursultan Nazarabayev Educational Foundation), where eight other co-owners are members of the family clan of the former Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan Erlan Sagadiev.

It was during the period when thefts occurred at MUIT that Murzabekova bought three plots of land, five commercial premises, two apartments in elite residential complexes at prices several times lower than the market and two parking spaces in Almaty and the Almaty region. Now you can add to this list an apartment in an Alpine chalet for 800 million tenge.