In the West Kazakhstan Region, officers of the Agency for Financial Monitoring have broken up a "grey" grain import scheme in which foreign grain was passed off as the harvest of Kazakh farms. The news was reported by infohub.kz.
According to investigators, the suspects illegally brought in around 130,000 tonnes of imported grain worth a total of 11.2 billion tenge. To legalise the foreign goods and present them as produced in Kazakhstan, the perpetrators set up a chain of shell companies and fake transactions. The limited liability partnerships Bakery Nan, KazGrano, Perfect Seed, Weizen and Golden Grain Kazakhstan were registered in advance in the names of straw men.
Fictitious purchase and sale agreements were concluded with domestic farms. This made it possible to issue Kazakh documents for the imported grain and ship it freely for export to Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
The main purpose of the paperwork fraud over the origin of the goods was to obtain a preferential domestic railway tariff. Transporting Kazakh grain across the country costs significantly less than international transit. As a result of passing off imports as local produce, the company KTZ — Freight Transportation lost more than 1 billion tenge in transit tariffs.
In addition, those involved channelled money to affiliated accounts and deliberately initiated bankruptcy proceedings in order to avoid paying taxes. The total damage to the state amounted to 1.2 billion tenge. Five people have been named as suspects in the case, and the investigation has been completed and is being sent to court.
Earlier, drought in the northern and central regions of Kazakhstan created risks for the grain harvest.