It sounds like a story written in Hollywood: The power-hungry daughter of a dictator vanishes, brought down by rivalry and greed, imprisoned in her home — or maybe even poisoned. Left behind are a billion dollars in frozen bribe payments, fake companies and the bitter betrayals at the center of a corrupt regime.
In Feb. 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative announced it was seeking the forfeiture of more than half a billion dollars held in Swiss bank accounts, which investigators had traced to bribes paid by the major telecommunications firms to Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s former President Islam Karimov.
Nearly $1 billion is now frozen in European banks, awaiting a decision by a U.S. district court on the U.S. Justice Department’s forfeiture claim. The assets are subject to U.S. jurisdiction because they were transmitted through U.S. financial institutions on their way to accounts held in Latvia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.