Fifty years old, a girl’s face, one career as daughter of the dictator: a period from pop-stara period from diplomaticvarious arrests.
The life of Gulnara Karimovavery rich daughter of the former president of Uzbekistanthe authoritarian Islam Karimovis at the center of a dossier by the Freedom for Eurasia think tank, to be published on March 14 and prompted the BBC, which previewed it, to ask how much the UK is able to control the flood of black money that comes from foreign countries.
Gulnara Karinova, according to the report entitled “Who helped the Uzbek princess?” a £200m (€240m) real estate empire between London and Hong Kong, with a British company system. The money, so the report, ‘were obtained with bribery and corruption» and they served to buy «houses and a jet».
British authorities have long been accused of not doing enough to prevent foreign criminals from using UK property to launder money – so much so that many journalistic reports refer to London as the Londonstan, or Londongrad. The ease with which Karimova obtained property in the UK was ‘worrying’, the report said.
For a time Gulnara Karimova was in the running to succeed her father, Islam Karimov, who ruled Uzbekistan as president from 1989 until his death in 2016. Then the pop breakthrough.
She has appeared in pop videos under the stage name «Cut Out», ran a jewelry company and was also the Uzbek ambassador to Spain. But then in 2014 she disappeared from public view. It later emerged that she had been detained on corruption charges while her father was still in power and was sentenced in December 2017.
In 2019, she ended up in prison for violating house arrest. Prosecutors accused her of being part of a criminal group that controlled assets worth more than $1bn (£760m) in 12 countries, including the UK, Russia and the UAE. ‘The Karimova case is one of the biggest bribery and corruption cases of all time,’ says one of the researchers who edited the report
Freedom For Eurasia looked at land records to identify at least 14 properties. The report focuses on five properties purchased in and around Londonworth an estimated £50 million, including three apartments in Belgraviajust west of Buckingham Palace, a house in Mayfair and a manor house in Surrey £18million with a private navigable lake.
Two of the Belgravia apartments were sold in 2013 before Karimova was arrested. In 2017, the house in Mayfair, the Surrey villa and a third flat in Belgravia were frozen by the authorities.
The Freedom For Eurasia report also names companies in London and the British Virgin Islands which he claims were used by Karimova or her associates to enable them to spend the proceeds of the crime on property and the private airliner.
A nabob’s life. For which, this is the thesis of the think tank, Karimova can also thank the slowness, if not the connivance, of the British authorities.