Sauat Mukhametbayevich Mynbayev

Sauat Mukhametbayevich Mynbayev


RELATED TO

Kazakhstan - Russia - Bermuda

About

Sauat Mukhametbayevich Mynbayev was Kazakhstan’s oil and gas minister from 2010 to 2013, having previously served as the country’s minister of energy ​and mineral resources from 2007 to 2010, minister of industry from 2004 to 2006 and minister of finance from 1998 to1999. He is currently the chairman of ​the management board of KazMunayGas, the country’s gas and oil company.

In the Data

Mynbayev, recorded as a “politically exposed person” in Appleby’s client database, has been a shareholder in Meridian Capital Ltd. since its incorporation in ​Bermuda in 2002. The latest information in Appleby’s records is from 2014. The company is partly owned by Kazakhstan business tycoon Askar Alshinbayev, ​and a document from one of Meridian Capital’s previous affiliates shows that in 2011 Mynbayev had a 20 percent stake in the company.


An archived version of the company’s website that year put Meridian Capital’s assets at more than $3 billion as of 2006.


Additional information about Meridian Capital is contained in documents belonging to the Swiss bank HSBC that were the basis of ICIJ’s Swiss Leaks ​investigation. In May 2005, an HSBC attorney who met with Meridian Capital executive Ian Connor, a bank client, noted that the Bermuda company “is ​essentially a venture capital business investing in distressed companies in commodities, mining and resources” and that the company had been “very ​successful over the last few years through its participation in gold mining and oil prospecting companies.” In 2012 Meridian sold a shopping center in St. ​Petersburg to a U.S. private fund for $1.1 billion, in what has been described by Forbes magazine as one of the largest single transactions in the Russian ​commercial real estate market thus far.


The company now also partly controls several airports in Russia, according to Kazakh and Russian media reports.

RESPONSE

KazMunayGas said that Mynbayev is not a founder and shareholder of Meridian Capital Ltd. Mynbayev did not personally respond to questions.

This visualization contains relevant information in relation to the profiled individual. Some additional connections might show up once we ​release the full structured data connected to the Paradise Papers investigation in the coming weeks.

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