British authorities confiscated two apartments in London Belgravia and a mansion in Surrey from Gulnara Karimova

‘Uzbek princess’ stripped of £20m dowry

British authorities confiscated three luxury properties belonging to the daughter of the first president of Uzbekistan Gulnara Karimova. This decision was made by the Supreme Court of the country on August 8, reports the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) on Twitter. the department said in a statement.

These are two apartments in the London area of ​​Belgravia and a mansion in Surrey. The total value of the three properties is over £20 million ($25.5 million). The Anti-Fraud Bureau believes that they were bought with proceeds from corruption schemes.

SFO filed a lawsuit on the seizure of Karimova’s British assets, including these three properties, in October 2018.
Gulnara Karimova – the eldest daughter of the first president of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov (held his post from the country’s independence until his death in 2016). Karimova was born in 1972 in Ferghana and graduated from high school and university in Tashkent. Later studied at Harvard University, in the late 1990s – early 2000s, she worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan. In particular, she worked at the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Russia, at the Permanent Mission of Uzbekistan to the UN. In 2010-2012, Karimova was the ambassador to Spain. In parallel with her diplomatic activities, she was engaged in fashion design, released her own brand of perfume, and also performed on stage under the pseudonym Googoosha.

In 2015 (while her father was still alive), she was sentenced to five years in prisonpleading guilty to assisting a criminal group that was engaged in embezzlement, extortion of money, embezzlement of public funds, and tax evasion.

The country’s Prosecutor General’s Office reported this only two years later. In 2017, Karimova was sentenced to another ten years in prison, but then the court changed the sentence to restriction of freedom for five years, allowing her to serve her sentence at her daughter’s house.

However, in March 2019, the punishment was toughened by transferring the woman back to the colony for violating the conditions of the regime. In August of the same year, they filed against her new criminal cases on charges of embezzlement of public funds and extortion of other people’s property on an especially large scale. The investigation considered that the daughter of the ex-president purchased from the state shares of the Kuvasaycement and Bekabadcement enterprises at a lower cost, and then resold these securities abroad, which caused “damage to the interests of the republic on an especially large scale.” In addition, Karimova was accused of “under the threat of violence” she forced businessmen to transfer their property to companies owned by her.

In March 2020, the Tashkent City Criminal Court increased Karimova’s prison sentence to 13 years and four months in a new criminal case on the creation of a criminal community, extortion and embezzlement.

The total amount of assets associated with Gulnara Karimova in Russia, Switzerland, France, the United States and a number of other countries is estimated more than $1.3 billion. The government of Uzbekistan is trying to return some of them. In particular, in February 2022, the Moscow City Court confiscated six of her apartments in Moscow. The money from the sale of these apartments will be divided between Moscow and Tashkent, said Deputy Minister of Justice of Uzbekistan Muzraf Ikramov.