With elections to Kyrgyzstan’s ever-volatile parliament just a year away, it is an uneasy time to be a private businessman in the Central Asian country. According to managers at one of the country’s most popular media outlets, the pre-election shakedown has begun.
As politicians prepare for the 2015 ballot, the competition over votes and the resources necessary to secure them is expected to be intense. One way of fundraising is to turn to the time-honored tradition of corporate raids – raiderstvo in Russian – at key moments in the political calendar. Now Vechernii Bishkek, a profitable media outlet whose Russian-language newspaper has a weekly circulation of over 50,000 copies, is claiming that it has fallen victim to a raid from “people close to President [Almazbek] Atambayev.”
Vechernii Bishkek’s ownership structure is complicated. In 2000, the paper – and, significantly, its wholly owned print house – fell into the hands of Adil Toygonbaev, the son-in-law of then-President Askar Akayev. Toygonbaev secured a 50-percent stake in the holding company from one of its two owners before reportedly expropriating it entirely in a move that simultaneously relieved his family’s regime of the paper’s critical reporting and added the country's best-selling Russian-language newspaper to the family's list of assets.
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Kyrgyzstan’s Politicos Seek Cash Cows as Parliamentary Campaign Looms
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