Cash for Access

This story first broke a week ago, but if you’ve not heard about it yet, well, just watch this video.

The classy fellow promising he will try to arrange a meeting between Bush administration officials and former President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev, and maybe, just maybe, try to give him a nudge back into office is Stephen Payne, whom The Sunday Times absolutely pwned.

Payne has since stepped down from a Department of Homeland Security advisory council on which he sat. Payne has traveled with the President and Vice President on foreign trips, and The Sunday Times now reports that he may have been arranged in earlier shady dealings involving Central Asia. The paper is now reporting that Payne helped arrange Dick Cheney’s 2006 visit to Kazakhstan in which the Vice President heaped praise on President Nursultan Nazrbaev.

Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, who in 2005 was an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, a billionaire and son-in-law of Nazarbayev, was involved in the negotiations with Payne.

Dosmukhamedov, who has since founded an opposition party and gone into exile, said his negotiations, carried out at the behest of the Kazakh government, specified that Cheney would visit Kazakhstan.

He understood that the money was paid to Payne’s company via KazMunayGas (KMG), the Kazakh state-owned oil and gas company, on the understanding that some of it would be passed to people connected to the Bush administration.

Payne denies having received any payments from KMG, but The Sunday Times says that there is a conduit through which funds could have easily passed from KMG to Payne’s company.

A sister company to WSP, Worldwide Strategic Energy (WSE), of which Payne is also president, has a subsidiary, Caspian Alliance, which is the sole US representative for KMG.

The disclosure is contained within a draft of a 44-page WSE “placement memorandum” brochure circulated to potential energy investors last year. It adds that the Caspian Alliance was “providing KazMunayGas with political risk analysis as well as access to energy leaders and executives”.

And to make this even more interesting, Payne has a very close relationship with Randy Scheunemann, a key adviser to John McCain. It looks like Central Asia could pop its head into the US presidential campaign, though unfortunately not in the way that one might hope it would.

This post was written by...

Nathan Hamm – author of 2974 posts on Registan.net.

Nathan is the Founding Editor and Publisher of Registan.net, which he launched in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with private and government clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural and political factors shape risks and opportunities and how organizations can adjust their strategic and operational plans to account for these variables. Nathan is currently seeking research, analysis, and consulting opportunities. He can be contacted via Twitter or email.

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