Construction of a tunnel on the alternative route North-South. Source: Gov.kgOn 26 June 2018, the Fergana website published my investigation unveiling corruption schemes behind Kyrgyzstan’s biggest infrastructure project, an alternative 433km road linking the capital Bishkek in the North with the country’s main city in the South, Osh. The project has been funded with a 850 million USD loan from the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China under the One Belt One Road Initiative, with the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) as the main implementing partner.
According to the documents published on Fergana, former Minister of Transport and Communications Kalykbek Sultanov and the current Minister Zhamshitbek Kalilov – the latter allegedly one of former Prime Minister Sapar Isakov’s protégés – were responsible for the project. The documents suggest these officials colluded with the contractor CRBC to embezzle funds from the Chinese government’s infrastructure investments. It appears that price tags were inflated by several orders of magnitude, from paying 1.1 USD per kilogramme of cement (cost on the local market: 0.07 USD) to paying 2,000 USD per month to provide office space to an engineer on the construction site.
In an interview with Azattyk, the Kyrgyz branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, member of parliament and leader of the opposition Ata Meken party Almambet Shykmamatov stated that, given past cases of corruption in infrastructure projects, he does not believe “in the fairytale that not a cent was stolen” from the road construction contracts. In the same interview, officials from the Ministry of Transport and Communications threatened to press charges against me for the Fergana investigation.
