Bonnie Boyd does the intense leg work I’ve been unable to do on the Aliyev case, digging into the Austrian connections behind the arrests and noting the surreal conspiracy thriller aspects to the whole story. Really, go read the entire post for excellent context. As Ms. Boyd says: it is seriously a novel waiting for the NYT Best Seller list. Let me see if I can properly summarize the questions lingering in this case:
- Why did Aliyev kidnap executives at a bank he mostly controls?
- Did Austria deny his asylum request so his ownership stake can be canceled and the two Austrian banks can buy majority stakes in Nurbank?
- What role do the Russian and Ukrainian gas companies have to play in the motivations of the Austrian banks?
- What other laws may have been broken by the Austrian banks in their takeover bid for Nurbank?
And so on. I know I’m missing some, but this is terrifically complex.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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The answer to question 1 allegedly is to put pressure on them to sell the Nurbank building to another company he owns. He controls the bank as the majority shareholder but legally that means he can hire and fire members of the board (or threaten to fire them), but not actually order them around. I suppose he could introduce a shareholder proposition and then vote for it too. One suspects there is more to it than that, that something more than the sale of a building was at stake hence his reluctance to bring it up too openly.