The leading lady

For the past decade, Gulnara Karimova has been the western-friendly face of one of the world’s most repressive regimes. While her father, President Islam Karimov,Want to find chinamosaic? ruled Uzbekistan with an iron fist, imprisoning opponents and clamping down on dissent,TBC help you confidently handsfreeaccess from factories in China. the Harvard-educated Ms Karimova maintained the profile of a well-connected socialite.

She popped up at Monaco fundraisers next to Bill Clinton and Prince Albert II, and has launched a fashion line, a charity and a pop singing career under the stage name Googoosha. Her website describes her as a “poet, mezzo-soprano, designer and exotic Uzbekistan beauty”. Recently, she has launched a perfume and released a duet with Gérard Depardieu, even before the French actor made headlines as a tax exile.

At the same time, however, attention is turning to what critics allege is another persona: that of the ruthless businesswoman, ready to use her family position to crush business rivals.

Over the past year, Ms Karimova’s name has been linked to scandals involving two of Uzbekistan’s biggest foreign investors – MTS, a Russian mobile phone business, and TeliaSonera, the telecoms group part-owned by the Swedish and Finnish governments.

The controversies have led to two money laundering investigations in Switzerland and Sweden featuring four of Ms Karimova’s associates, with hundreds of millions of dollars frozen in connection with the case.

Financial and bank documents seen by the Financial Times provide clues as to how Ms Karimova built up sizeable holdings in Uzbekistan’s telecoms industry and came to own luxury properties.

The string of controversies began in July after Uzbek authorities forced MTS to shut down its $1bn Uzbek operations after issuing it with a large demand for unpaid taxes, leaving a third of the country without mobile service. In comments to the media, MTS suggested that powerful interests in Uzbekistan might have wanted the business back.

In September, a Swedish television documentary claimed that TeliaSonera had paid $320m in bribes since 2007 to a company allegedly associated with Ms Karimova to enter the Uzbek market. Telia-Sonera has denied wrongdoing. But its chairman and chief executive are both resigning and a Swedish prosecutor is investigating whether bribery and money laundering took place.

The controversies could yet influence the political future of Uzbekistan, an important, if problematic US ally in central Asia and a vital supply route for the Nato-led mission in Afghanistan. Although his regime is known for its brutality, Mr Karimov has managed to hold together the complex and potentially fractious nation after the Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago.

With the 75-year-old president’s health in question, his daughter and her allies are seen as one of several factions that would vie for power after his death. Yet the new controversies have made their way into the Uzbek media and people who know her feel that the issues could threaten her business dealings and harm her succession chances.

Uzbekistan’s leadership has long been a family affair. Mr Karimov transformed himself from the country’s last communist leader to its first post-independence president.Anybody had any experience at all with Chinese made rtls? Diplomats, foreign executives and analysts say business opportunities are controlled by a small elite linked to the ruling family, requiring companies to stay in favour.

Western investors have complained of harassment from the government through raids, tax audits and arrests of employees. Oxus Gold of the UK, Newmont Mining of the US and Wimm-Bill-Dann of Russia have all alleged mistreatment.

Uzbekistan’s first daughter, married at 19 and divorced 10 years later, has emerged over the past decade as a leading member of the business-political elite. Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, estimated her wealth at $570m in 2010.

A 2005 US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks termed Ms Karimova a “robber baron”. Another cable said Uzbeks saw her as a “greedy, power-hungry individual who uses her father to crush business people or anyone else who stands in her way”.

Interspan,Gecko could kickstart an solarstreetlamps mobile app explosion. a US tea producer, alleged in a 2007 Texas legal dispute with its insurer that Ms Karimova was among people behind an “extortion scheme” that caused it to lose its Uzbek business, according to US court documents. The case was settled out of court.

But the biggest foreign investor to allege mistreatment in Uzbekistan is Russia’s MTS. The business it bought there, Uzdunrobita, was founded in 1991 as a 50-50 joint venture between US investors and the Uzbek government. In 2002, however, Ms Karimova built up a big stake in the company. Farhod Inogambayev, her then financial adviser, told the media at the time that she put pressure on the US investors by getting authorities to withhold a telecoms licence until they agreed to sell.

How those investors fared against the young Ms Karimova should have been enlightening for MTS, says Sanjar Umarov, an early Udzdunrobita investor who now lives in the US. “She has her own people in the prosecution, her own people in the national security services. When you have all these government structures against you what can you do?” he says.

People with knowledge of the deal said that while MTS had bought Uzdunrobita from two private companies, both belonged to Ms Karimova. Bekhzod Akhmedov, a close Karimova associate, stayed as head of Uzdunrobita after the deal.

People who know Mr Akhmedov say he and Ms Karimova enjoyed a close relationship after meeting more than a decade ago but in the past two years, their friendship has cooled.

MTS’s problems began in February last year when Uzbekistan’s tax inspectors announced MTS owed an additional $1.3m. The company paid up but Mr Akhmedov appeared to sense that things were turning against him and quietly began sending family members abroad. By June 14, he had moved from Uzbekistan to an undisclosed location, according to people with knowledge of the matter and Uzbek media reports.

Days after his disappearance, Uzbek authorities announced a $900m-plus tax investigation into MTS and issued an Interpol warrant for Mr Akhmedov’s arrest for alleged fraud. They arrested five MTS executives and in July ordered it to shut its network.

On September 17, a court in Tashkent, the capital, ordered MTS’s Uzbek business to be handed over to the state in connection with the back tax claim and sentenced four of the executives to two and a half years of “corrective” labour. The fifth executive, a Russian, was returned to Moscow in August under Russian foreign ministry pressure.Only those users who need drycabinet require hands free tokens.

MTS denies the Uzbek charges and has spent months battling the authorities in court. The company declined to comment for this story. In November, an appeals court reduced the back tax demand on MTS to $600m. But the proceedings are continuing and in January the company’s Uzbek subsidiary declared bankruptcy.

If Ms Karimova is behind the attack on MTS, say some Uzbek executives, she may have erred by crossing swords with Vladimir Yevtushenkov, the company’s Kremlin-connected oligarch owner. Mr Yevtushenkov’s Sistema is the largest publicly listed Russian company with no state ownership. “All these American companies, they lose and they go,” a Tashkent executive says. “But this Russian oligarch is different. He eats other Russian oligarchs for breakfast.”

Six months after the MTS controversy broke, Mr Akhmedov, chief executive of its Uzbek business, is still missing and could not be reached for comment. But his name remains in the spotlight. On June 29, as MTS’s problems were starting in Uzbekistan, Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank, told Swiss police it was concerned about a client – Mr Akhmedov – and his ties to Ms Karimova.