President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has spent the past several years presenting Kazakhstan as a country in transition: more transparent, more rules-based and more responsive to the public than the system he inherited. Since the violent unrest of January 2022, his “New Kazakhstan” agenda has been framed as a project of institutional renewal, legal accountability and political modernization. But for ordinary Kazakhs, the test is not whether the state can speak the language of reform. It is whether reform can change who the state actually serves.
Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet political economy was built around a deeply unequal settlement. Like in Russia and other formerly communist nations, strategic sectors, public assets and financial institutions became closely tied to a small group of politically connected businessmen who accumulated vast wealth during the country’s transition from communism to market capitalism. For decades, the result was a system in which the few enjoyed extraordinary access to resources, influence and protection, while the many were left to live with the consequences of inequality, corruption and weak public accountability.
The question facing Kazakhstan today is whether Tokayev’s “New Kazakhstan” can begin to break with that legacy. Can the country build institutions capable of enforcing the law against the powerful? Can it recover public confidence after years in which wealth and political access appeared to place certain figures above ordinary rules? And can reform be made meaningful not only for investors, diplomats and international observers, but for the citizens whose frustration exploded onto the streets in January 2022?
The case of Dinmukhamet Idrisov offers a revealing test. He’s one of Kazakhstan’s 20 richest men and amassed his substantial wealth during the country’s turbulent transition to capitalism in the 1990s. He built his fortune across strategically important sectors including construction, transport, utilities and finance. Since 2017, he’s become embroiled in a series of unresolved financial disputes after a couple of banks in which he had a stake went into financial meltdown. These have grown into much larger issues concerning corporate transparency and political influence that raise deeper democratic questions: mainly, whether Kazakhstan’s old business elite can finally be made answerable to the public interest.
Idrisov’s legal troubles are the result of two banking controversies involving Bank RBK and Qazaq Banki. Bank RBK teetered on the edge of collapse in 2017 and had to be rescued by the state, while Qazaq Banki fell into bankruptcy and was liquidated in 2018. Idrisov held documented stakes in both banks, with records showing that he owned 7.5 percent of Bank RBK shares in mid-2017 and roughly 9 percent of Qazaq Banki in 2018. When Bank RBK sank into crisis, its assets were transferred to DSFK LLP, a Kazakh entity established for the purpose of financially restructuring the bank.
For a narrow business audience, this might look like a matter of creditor protection and financial-sector oversight. But the Idrisov case is not only about market confidence: It’s about who pays when elite financial networks fail.
Bank collapses do not happen in a social vacuum. When banks are rescued, restructured or liquidated, the costs are rarely borne only by those who profited from them. Workers, depositors, taxpayers and the wider public are often left exposed to the consequences of bad lending, weak oversight and opaque ownership. Contested debt recovery is therefore not merely a technical legal issue but a question of distributive justice.
Numerous investigations into suspected embezzlement followed the banking scandals, leading to the conviction and imprisonment of Bakhyt Ibrahim, another major shareholder in Qazaq Banki, and Zhomart Ertaev, a banker who had purchased broadcaster Alma TV from Idrisov several years earlier. Idrisov, meanwhile, emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed. That changed when Bank RBK returned to the headlines in 2024, after Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court reportedly refused to review earlier rulings in a dispute between Idrisov and DSFK relating to the bank’s 2017 rescue.
Idrisov and his affiliated group reportedly signed an agreement to repay more than 65 billion tenge, or about USD$140 million, by November 2020. However, a portion of the debt amounting to roughly 28.6 billion tenge, or about $61.5 million, allegedly went unpaid. DSFK first won an arbitration ruling ordering Idrisov to repay the debt. Idrisov responded with a counterclaim asking DSFK to accept DSFK bonds worth 28 billion tenge instead of cash. In January 2022, the arbitrator sided with Idrisov, maintaining that the bonds could be used to offset his liability. That ruling was later overturned on appeal, and the Supreme Court declined to reopen the case, leaving the appellate reversal in place.
Whatever the precise legal merits of the dispute, the broader picture is clear. A major businessman repeatedly appears in long-running, high-stakes litigation tied to a bank whose collapse became a public scandal. For Kazakhstan, this is not simply a question of one oligarch’s liabilities. It is a test of whether the law can operate independently of wealth and political access.
In the old Kazakhstan, there was a widespread perception that the politically connected economic elite lived under different rules from everyone else. That perception is corrosive because, not only is it unjust, it’s also bad for business. It undermines faith in public institutions, deepens cynicism about reform and reinforces the belief that ordinary citizens are asked to obey laws that the rich can negotiate around. If powerful business figures can delay, dilute or avoid accountability in major financial disputes, “New Kazakhstan” risks becoming an empty slogan planted upon the same unequal foundations.
The eventual outcome of Idrisov’s case will therefore be a measure of progress. But this will not come without resistance: Idrisov has tried to portray the Tokayev administration as both corrupt and inefficient while talking himself up as a potential alternative leader for the country. Kazakhstan’s old business elite seem unlikely to give up their privileges without a fight.
Idrisov is not the only wealthy figure to encounter new limits to unaccountability in recent years. Kairat Boranbayev, Kairat Satybaldyuly and Timur Kulibayev are among other members of the Nazarbayev-era elite whose assets and business dealings have come under heightened scrutiny since 2022. These cases suggest that figures once considered untouchable can actually become subject to investigation, prosecution, asset return or legal challenge if the state decides to uphold its own laws.
That matters because Kazakhstan’s reform agenda cannot be judged only by constitutional amendments, speeches or foreign investment roadshows. It must be judged by whether the state can dismantle the informal privileges that allowed a small class of men to dominate the country’s political economy. A more equal Kazakhstan requires more than technocratic modernization. It requires democratic accountability over wealth, public assets and institutions.
There is, however, a danger in treating elite accountability as something that can be delivered from above alone. If “New Kazakhstan” is to mean more than a rebalancing within the ruling class, it must be connected to the demands of society: fairer distribution, stronger public oversight, independent courts, labour rights, social protection and genuine democratic participation. The unrest of January 2022 reflected not only anger at corruption, but frustration with inequality and the enduring influence of entrenched elite networks. Those grievances cannot be answered by replacing one set of insiders with another.
For foreign investors, the Idrisov affair is a test of legal certainty and political risk. For ordinary Kazakhs, it is also a test of justice: they want to see a society in which public institutions serve the majority rather than protect the few. The Idrisov case should therefore be seen as a window that, once resolved, might allow us to peer into Kazakhstan’s future. It will serve as a test of Tokayev’s promises to build a more transparent and rules-based state. Technocratic reforms have a major role to play, but these also need to be coupled with a sense of fairness where elites actually face the consequences of their actions.
If “New Kazakhstan” is to become a genuine break with the old order, it must become a project of democratic accountability, economic justice and public power. These elements have been absent in the country for far too long.
