A Fugitive from Justice

There has been a lot of buzzing going on in the web about the high-profile case of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a former Kazakh Minister of Energy, Industry and Trade and ex-Chairman of BTA Bank, the country’s biggest lender. Some call him an opponent of the long-time Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, others dub him a ‘fugitive fraudster and oligarch’. While his extradition was heard by the French courts, he also earned a nickname of ‘expert fugitive’ (l’expert de la fuite) from the French press. This is why we set out on another journalistic investigation.