When Nursultan Nazarbayev resigned the Kazakh presidency in March 2019, handing power to Senate speaker Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the transition looked orderly on paper. In practice, it produced years of paralysis, a violent political crisis, and ultimately a cascade of criminal prosecutions that has sent former ministers, oligarchs and security chiefs to prison — and returned billions of dollars in assets to the state.
The years between Nazarbayev’s departure and the upheaval of January 2022 are widely described as a period of dual power. Tokayev’s circle was known informally as the “Akorda,” after the presidential residence in Astana; loyalists to the former president clustered around what became known as the “Library” — a reference to the Library of the First President. Officials inherited from the Nazarbayev era were widely assumed to be reporting to the Library rather than to the new head of state. Tokayev announced a programme of political, economic and social reforms, but political and economic changes were effectively sabotaged, and even a National Council of Public Trust he assembled failed to break the deadlock.
Within those constraints, a limited purge still began. In 2020, Bulat Bakauov, the akim of Pavlodar region and a figure associated with high-profile scandals under Nazarbayev, was arrested on charges of abusing his authority. The sentence reflected the limits of Tokayev’s reach at the time: Bakauov received a 3.5-year restriction of freedom, was ordered to stay at his residence, perform a hundred hours of public labour, return $10,000, and was banned from public office — but served no prison time.
The same year, attention turned to Bauyrzhan Baibek, former akim of Almaty, whose rise was attributed to his father’s childhood friendship with Nazarbayev. Urban legends about illegal earnings from the reconstruction of central Almaty circulated widely, with many believing he left office a dollar millionaire. Baibek fled Kazakhstan after the January 2022 unrest; his whereabouts remain unknown. A criminal case against him was only initiated in September 2022. Meanwhile, a district judge in Almaty, Svetlana Zholamanova, was detained in 2021 on fraud charges after $10,000 was found in her office; rumours linked her to Baibek. That case was swiftly terminated, resulting only in her dismissal from the judiciary — until October 2024, when it was reopened and she was placed in detention for two months, apparently as Baibek’s alleged protection evaporated.
Former Health Minister Yelzhan Birtanov spent two years under house arrest facing charges of misusing air medical services and implementing a defective digital platform. He was acquitted on the first count but received five years of restricted liberty on the second. His trial was conducted online because of COVID-19 restrictions.
January 2022 and the Unleashing of Prosecutions
The protests that erupted in Zhanaozen in early January 2022 and spread rapidly — with Almaty becoming the epicentre of the worst violence, including the torching of municipal buildings and looting of commercial premises — ended with Tokayev calling in a Collective Security Treaty Organisation force and declaring constitutional order restored. The crisis, which Tokayev characterised as a coup attempt, effectively dissolved the constraints that had hobbled him. In a subsequent speech in Almaty, he announced his intention to build a “New,” “Just and Fair Kazakhstan” — and the phrase “Old Kazakhstan” became shorthand for the network of interests he now moved against.
The first major arrest was Karim Massimov, former head of the National Security Committee, taken into custody during the days of what became known as “Bloody January.” Massimov was charged with state treason, the attempted forcible seizure of power, and abuse of power. The case was classified top secret. On 24 April 2023, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
On 13 March 2022, Nazarbayev’s eldest nephew, businessman Kairat Satybaldy, was detained at Almaty airport while attempting to leave the country. He was accused of large-scale embezzlement through Kazakhtelecom JSC and Transport Service Center JSC. Satybaldy reached settlement agreements with both companies — reimbursing 12 billion tenge (approximately $24 million) to Kazakhtelecom and 28 billion tenge to the Transport Service Center — and both asked the court to drop the charges. The court nonetheless sentenced him on 26 September 2022 to six years in prison, with confiscation of property, a ten-year ban on holding office, and the stripping of his rank of Major General of the National Security Committee along with other state awards.
The asset recovery that followed was on a different scale entirely. By October 2023, Satybaldy had returned assets worth $300 million to the state; by December 2023, a further $120 million had been recovered through the Anti-Corruption Service. Over roughly two and a half years, the total returned reached 783 billion tenge — more than $1.5 billion. The remainder of his prison sentence was subsequently replaced with restriction of liberty.
The contrast with his brother was stark. Samat Abish, who was first deputy head of the National Security Committee at the time of the coup attempt, was tried in a closed session in March 2024 and received an eight-year suspended sentence, having spent no time under house arrest.
Oligarchs, Plea Deals and Returned Billions
Kairat Boranbayev, another oligarch with close ties to the Nazarbayev family, was arrested on 17 March 2022. He and co-defendants were suspected of embezzling 14.5 billion tenge (approximately $31 million) through natural gas import contracts and money laundering. Boranbayev initially pleaded not guilty; the court sentenced him to six years and confiscated assets including commercial premises in Almaty worth 686 million tenge and funds of 5.3 billion tenge held across accounts at Halyk Bank.
On appeal, Boranbayev changed course, entering a plea agreement and reimbursing 14.6 billion tenge in damages. He also voluntarily returned assets worth more than 90 billion tenge — including an oil field, a gas distribution company, shopping malls, a fitness centre chain, office space and a hotel complex in Astana — and transferred 30 billion tenge to an Education Infrastructure Support Fund. The court, noting full reimbursement, active cooperation and expressions of remorse, replaced his prison sentence with restriction of liberty.
Former Culture Minister Arystanbek Mukhamediuly was arrested on 29 May 2022, suspected of embezzling more than 221 million tenge (approximately $490,000) allocated for international exhibitions. A further incident involving inflated costs for completed works emerged a month into the case. Mukhamediuly denied guilt throughout and his lawyer sought house arrest on medical grounds following surgery; the petition was rejected. He was sentenced to eight years, later extended to eleven.
A state Committee for the Return of Illegally Withdrawn or Acquired Assets continues to operate, publishing figures on sums recovered but not the names of those who returned them or the circumstances behind their decisions. The pattern that has emerged — arrest, negotiation, asset return, sentence commutation — raises questions that analysts and observers in Kazakhstan openly debate: whether the prosecutions represent a genuine reckoning with systemic corruption, a targeted political purge of potential rivals, or some combination of both. Several members of Nazarbayev’s family and inner circle left Kazakhstan after January 2022 without facing any legal proceedings. The question of where accountability ends and political calculation begins remains, for now, unanswered.
