A billionaire says he surrendered a valuable mining interest under pressure from prosecutors. His long effort to reverse the deal captures the difficult transition between Kazakhstan’s old system of influence and its promise of stronger institutions.

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — The business dispute that has followed Dinmukhamet Idrisov for years began with neither gold nor prosecutors.

It began with real estate.

During the boom years of the 2000s, when money was pouring into Kazakhstan and Almaty was filling with ambitious new developments, companies associated with some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen entered into a series of property ventures. Billions of tenge changed hands. Then came the global financial crisis, projects faltered and partnerships turned into disputes.

Years later, the consequences would engulf Dinmukhamet Idrisov, a billionaire whose interests have extended across construction, energy, utilities and mining, in an extraordinary battle over one of Kazakhstan’s gold producers.

The dispute over AltynEx Company is complicated even by the standards of post-Soviet corporate litigation. It has involved civil claims, a criminal investigation, a mediation agreement, transfers of shares, psychological examinations and conflicting court decisions.

But its significance extends beyond the fortunes of the businessmen involved.

The case offers a window onto a larger question confronting Kazakhstan as it attempts to distance itself from the economic and political practices of its first three decades of independence: What should a reforming state do with deals made under the old rules?

For Idrisov, the answer is that an injustice should be corrected.

For his opponents, the danger is that transactions can never truly be considered settled.

From Property to Gold

The origins of the conflict reach back to business relationships involving an Almaty development project.

By 2018, companies on the other side of the dispute were seeking more than 80 billion tenge in claims connected with investments and property. Idrisov contested his responsibility for much of that amount.

Then the nature of the confrontation changed.

Valikhan Koshumbaïev filed a criminal complaint over financial transactions associated with the earlier projects. Idrisov was questioned as a witness with the right to defense, a procedural status that can precede designation as a suspect.

According to Idrisov’s subsequent account, the investigation became an exercise in intense pressure. He has described lengthy interrogations and an atmosphere in which he believed that his personal freedom was at risk.

His opponents have disputed the suggestion that the eventual agreement was coerced.

In November 2018, the parties reached a mediation agreement. Claims were settled through an arrangement involving shares in AltynEx, which operates the Yubileynoye gold deposit in Kazakhstan’s Aktobe region.

Approximately 22.7 billion tenge of obligations were addressed through the agreement. Shares belonging to Idrisov and other investors were transferred.

The criminal investigation was closed shortly afterward after authorities concluded that there was no criminal event.

For several years, the deal stood.

Then Idrisov came back to court.

Was It Coercion — or a Settlement?

The argument Dinmukhamet Idrisov eventually presented was striking.

He maintained that he had not freely surrendered AltynEx. Rather, the pressure surrounding the criminal investigation had left him believing that he faced a choice between relinquishing valuable business interests and risking imprisonment.

The disparity in valuations became part of his case. Idrisov’s side cited an Ernst & Young valuation putting AltynEx at 176.2 billion tenge — more than seven times the roughly 22.3 billion tenge value it associated with the disputed transaction.

If the numbers were correct, his lawyers argued, the imbalance itself supported the contention that the agreement was extraordinarily unfavorable.

Yet the first court to examine the argument was unconvinced.

The proceedings delved deeply into Idrisov’s state of mind. Court-appointed experts examined whether the stress of interrogations had compromised his ability to understand his actions. The findings did not establish the kind of psychological or psychiatric impairment necessary to support his account.

In June 2023, the Bostandyk District Court rejected Idrisov’s claim.

It was an important moment. A powerful businessman had asked the legal system to accept that pressure had deprived him of meaningful choice. The court declined.

But Idrisov appealed.

A Victory, but Not Quite the One He Argued For

In October 2024, the Almaty City Court reversed crucial parts of the earlier ruling and invalidated a series of transactions involving AltynEx shares.

Idrisov had won.

Yet the reasoning complicated the public story of the case.

The appellate court did not conclude that the psychological evidence proved Idrisov incapable of freely making the original agreement. Reporting based on the judgment indicates that the court continued to regard the evidence as showing that he understood his actions.

Instead, the decisive issue was legal.

AltynEx was connected to subsoil-use rights, and Kazakhstan imposes special requirements on transactions involving strategically important natural resources. The court found that the required authorization from the competent state authority had not been obtained when the shares were transferred.

That failure, the judges concluded, affected the validity of the transactions and the interests of the state.

The distinction is more than technical.

Idrisov had presented a story about an oligarch pressured by the machinery of the old state. The court ultimately gave him an important victory on a different proposition: that even powerful businessmen must follow formal rules governing the transfer of strategic assets.

That makes the AltynEx dispute an unusually revealing product of Kazakhstan’s political transition.

The Shadow of “Old Kazakhstan”

Dinmukhamet Idrisov made his fortune during the era of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who dominated Kazakhstan from independence in 1991 until his resignation as president in 2019.

The country changed dramatically during those decades. Oil and mineral wealth produced rapid economic growth, foreign investment poured in and a new business elite accumulated enormous fortunes.

But economic power was highly concentrated, and relationships between government and business were often opaque.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has explicitly sought to distance his government from that legacy, particularly since the violent unrest that shook Kazakhstan in January 2022.

The language of a “New Kazakhstan” has been accompanied by attempts to strengthen competition, alter judicial governance and reduce some forms of entrenched economic privilege.

The changes should not be exaggerated.

An OECD assessment found meaningful changes in judicial governance, including strengthened powers for the Supreme Judicial Council and new procedures affecting judicial appointments. But it also concluded that the presidency retains significant influence over the judicial system and that the council cannot yet be regarded as fully independent.

A separate OECD review in 2025 found substantial efforts to modernize competition policy while warning that state involvement in the economy remains extensive and that frequent legal changes can themselves undermine certainty for businesses.

That mixture — genuine reform and persistent institutional weakness — provides the backdrop to the Idrisov dispute.

The Oligarch’s Paradox

There is an irony in the position of Dinmukhamet Idrisov.

He is challenging practices associated with precisely the economic order in which he became extraordinarily successful.

That does not make his claims illegitimate. Powerful people can also be subjected to improper pressure. Indeed, a legal system demonstrates independence partly by allowing even members of an old elite to challenge the state and other powerful interests.

But the case also demonstrates why the transition away from oligarchic capitalism is difficult.

If the old system relied too heavily on informal leverage, the new one must rely on rules.

Those rules must permit past wrongdoing to be challenged. But they must also eventually establish certainty.

After the appellate judgment, the implementation of the decision itself generated another controversy. Shares were re-registered, and the opposing side challenged the process, arguing that property rights had been altered improperly. The Central Securities Depository said it had acted under judicial authority.

The battle thus produced another battle.

And that may be the most revealing feature of the entire affair.

Kazakhstan is trying to replace a system in which influence and relationships could determine outcomes with one in which institutions do. Yet institutional government is not simply about producing different winners. It requires establishing procedures that all sides accept even when they lose.

The AltynEx dispute shows how difficult that can be.

For Dinmukhamet Idrisov, the litigation is about an enormously valuable asset and his contention that circumstances surrounding its loss were unjust.

For Kazakhstan, the question is larger.

A country cannot leave its oligarchic past behind merely by declaring a new era. It must decide how to deal with the contracts, fortunes, grievances and powerful personalities produced by the old one. And it must do so without allowing every old dispute to become a new test of the state.

Read also:

• Idrisov Case Poses a Crucial Test for Kazakhstan’s Reform Agenda