The new chief of Kazakhstan’s central bank dodged a debt claim in 2014 thanks to a legal system that’s failed to protect lenders from rampant defaults and repeated crises.
In 2014, Yerbolat Dossayev and three business partners were given a reprieve on repaying 1.9 billion tenge, then worth $13 million, that they’d personally guaranteed to the central Asian country’s biggest bank at the time. It’s not clear whether the debt was ever repaid. Within three years, the lender, Kazkommertsbank, was buckling under the weight of a currency devaluation and numerous bad loans. It required a 2.6 trillion tenge ($6.9 billion) rescue, in part from the regulator that Dossayev was appointed to head up last month, and was taken over by a smaller bank.
