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A private company registered in Tashkent in March 2021 with a statutory capital equivalent to less than ten thousand US dollars secured more than one hundred million dollars’ worth of natural gas contracts from Uzbekistan’s state energy infrastructure within weeks of its incorporation — then vanished from public view within a year. An investigation by the Uzbek service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Ozodlik, has traced the company’s corporate network to Otabek Umarov, the son-in-law of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who has built his public image around an anti-corruption agenda.
The company, Ultimo Group Limited LLC, was registered on 10 March 2021. Its stated activity was wholesale trade in solid, liquid and gaseous fuels. Its website, ultimogroup.uz, has displayed a “site under construction” notice since the day it was registered and continues to do so three years later. It had no verifiable office and no track record in the energy sector. Yet within one month of its founding, it signed a contract worth 315 billion Uzbek soum — approximately thirty million dollars at the prevailing exchange rate — to supply natural gas to Qizilqumcement, Uzbekistan’s largest cement plant, a majority state-owned enterprise.
By the end of 2021, Ultimo Group had signed at least three additional agreements with Qizilqumcement, bringing the contracted gas volume to 379 million cubic metres. Across those contracts, the price charged by Ultimo Group rose by fifty per cent, even as the pressure specifications were lowered. Critically, the state gas transmission monopoly Uztransgas was simultaneously supplying natural gas to other members of the same industrial association — of which Qizilqumcement was a founding member — at sixty-three dollars per thousand cubic metres. Ultimo Group was charging ninety-five dollars, later raised to one hundred and forty-five dollars, for the same commodity.
A middleman with no legal basis
Under a presidential decree signed by Mirziyoyev himself on 9 July 2019, Uztransgas holds the exclusive mandate to purchase natural gas from producers and sell it directly to large industrial consumers connected to the main pipeline network. No publicly available regulation or decree authorises Uztransgas to engage commercial intermediaries for that function. Nevertheless, bank transfer records obtained by Ozodlik show that between January and September 2022, Uztransgas made eight separate payments to Ultimo Group Limited totalling sixty-six million, six hundred and twenty-eight thousand, five hundred and fifty-five US dollars. Each transfer carried an identical reference: payment for natural gas under an intermediary contract numbered 34/26-2021, signed on 31 August 2021.
Ozodlik’s documents also show that Ultimo Group began importing gas from Turkmenistan’s state company Turkmengaz as early as 1 April 2021 — twenty days after its incorporation. Trade data from the Chinese platform Sinoimex records at least sixteen purchases between April 2021 and January 2022, totalling approximately 955 million cubic metres of gas valued at just over eighty-eight million dollars. Court documents reviewed by Ozodlik indicate that Ultimo Group’s director and accountant were subsequently charged with importing Turkmen gas without completing customs cargo declarations and without paying customs duties or taxes.
The authority to act as the state’s sole gas import operator passed in June 2022 to a newly created state company, UzGasTrade, which formally assumed the centralised procurement role from 1 August 2022. Ultimo Group’s active period as an intermediary coincides almost precisely with the gap before that structure was formalised.
The ownership trail
Uzbekistan’s corporate registry lists Ultimo Group Limited’s current founders as Tuhfatkhoja Anvarkhojayev and Matlyuba Qayumova, each holding fifty per cent. The company’s director, from incorporation to the present, is Ravshan Mutalov.
Tuhfatkhoja Anvarkhojayev is the son of Shavkat Anvarovich Azamkhojayev, described as a long-serving officer of Uzbekistan’s State Security Service. His uncle, Alisher Azamkhojayev, has served as Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Turkey since Mirziyoyev came to power.
Anvarkhojayev’s original co-founder was Diyor Qayumov, identified in the biography section of a now-deleted website for an overseas Uzbek advisory council, Buyuk Kelajak, as a forty-four-year-old energy sector professional who studied in the United States and Canada and managed oil and gas projects at RLG International Inc. Qayumov withdrew from Ultimo Group in the summer of 2022 and was shortly afterwards appointed director of Tashkent City Mall, one of the most expensive construction projects in the city’s history. He was among the principal figures accompanying President Mirziyoyev during the president’s visit to Tashkent City Mall on 5 March of this year. A previous Ozodlik investigation established that the corporate structure behind Tashkent City Mall leads to Otabek Umarov, Mirziyoyev’s son-in-law, and to a figure described as the region’s most prominent smuggler.
When Qayumov left Ultimo Group, he transferred his fifty-per-cent stake to his mother, Matlyuba Qayumova, now sixty-seven years old. Her Facebook profile indicates she is a graduate of the Nizami Pedagogical Institute. Corporate records contain no evidence that she engaged in any business activity before becoming a co-owner of a company handling hundreds of millions of dollars in state gas contracts.
The Qayumov family declined to answer Ozodlik’s questions. Matlyuba Qayumova’s husband, Tohir Qayumov, said by telephone that his wife did not wish to speak to the reporter and that their son Diyor was travelling in Germany.
The Dubai connection and the son-in-law’s network
Two companies bearing the identical name Ultimo Group were registered in the United Arab Emirates in the months following the Tashkent incorporation: Ultimo Group FZE–LLC in Sharjah on 25 July 2021, and Ultimo Group FZCO in Dubai in September 2021. Both list fuel and petroleum product wholesale as their activity. The Sharjah entity’s licence holder and manager is a British national, Ross Thomas Connon.
Connon’s name is publicly associated with Otabek Umarov through the 7SABER sportswear brand. According to the brand’s own website and Uzbek state media, Connon’s company Berkeley Square Investments conducted a marketing study in Uzbekistan in 2020, concluded that a logo designed by Umarov — who chairs the Uzbekistan Triathlon Federation — had exceptional brand recognition, and subsequently acquired a five-year licence to use it. The 7SABER brand was formally launched in Tashkent on 25 June 2021; Umarov posted about the event on his official Instagram account the following day. Uzbekistan’s National Olympic Committee had already awarded 7SABER the contract to kit the national delegation at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, a year and a half before the public launch.
Ozodlik’s attempts to locate Berkeley Square Investments at its stated London address in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square House and at its stated Dubai address opposite the Burj Khalifa found no trace of the company at either location. On LinkedIn, Connon describes himself not as the head of a corporation but as a private-client adviser at Berkeley Square Investments and at a second organisation, Cross Border Freedom, which offers residency and citizenship-by-investment services in the United States, Canada, European Union member states and Caribbean jurisdictions. A 2023 joint report by the Financial Action Task Force and the OECD warned that citizenship-by-investment programmes have in many cases become vehicles for laundering proceeds of corruption, bribery, fraud and tax evasion.
A second figure connects the UAE Ultimo Group entities directly to Umarov’s known associates: Doniyor Qodirov, whose email address appears in the Sharjah free-zone authority’s virtual fine system as a contact for Ultimo Group FZE–LLC. A call to the phone number listed for the Dubai entity, Ultimo Group FZCO, was answered by an assistant who identified Qodirov as her manager. Qodirov’s LinkedIn profile states he lives in the UAE and specialises in luxury goods and jewellery. He appears in a photograph published on 8 May 2023 by the official Telegram channel of the Uzbekistan Judo Federation, captioned as showing Uzbek sports officials.
Qodirov is also the registered contact for rushmore.ae, the website of Rushmore Group in the UAE. The Tashkent entity Rushmore LLC shares its registered address — 23A Alay Bazaar Lane — with Urban Hayot, the company that holds the 7SABER brand licence on Umarov’s behalf, and with Baikal LLC, owned by Azizjon Kamilov, chairman of the Uzbekistan Judo Federation. Rushmore LLC’s founding director was Ravshan Mutalov — the same individual who has directed Ultimo Group Limited from its first day.
Ozodlik identifies Kamilov as one of the key figures in the Ultimo Group scheme. The link runs through Behruz Abdushukurov: Mutalov simultaneously directs Orton Logistics, whose sole owner is Abdushukurov. The contact email address in Ultimo Group Limited’s founding documents is behruz@mail.ru. In a telephone conversation with Ozodlik, Abdushukurov confirmed the address belongs to him but did not explain how it came to appear in Ultimo Group’s incorporation papers.
Meanwhile, Uzbekistan spent one hundred and sixty-six point seven million dollars on natural gas imports in January and February 2024 alone — nearly double the figure for the same two months a year earlier. The country, which holds more than one trillion cubic metres of proven gas reserves, now purchases 2.8 billion cubic metres annually from Russia’s Gazprom. Mirziyoyev himself raised the alarm about gas import dependency at a government meeting on 9 August 2021, the same period in which Ultimo Group was operating at full capacity as an undisclosed intermediary in the very trade he was publicly questioning. Uzbek citizens, who endure gas shortages for roughly half the year and face empty pipelines through much of each winter, have received no public accounting of how those import billions are spent.