Astana, 5 November, . A citizen of Kazakhstan suspected of large-scale fraud and of selling falsified medical devices has been extradited from Georgia to Kazakhstan, the Prosecutor General’s Office said.
Officers of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the National Security Committee carried out the extradition with the assistance of Kazakhstan’s embassy in Georgia. According to the investigation, the suspect set up an illegal scheme to obtain the status of a domestic manufacturer for medical equipment and submitted false information about its production in Kazakhstan to the authorised bodies, although no actual production was organised. The status gave advantages in tenders for the purchase of medical equipment by state medical institutions. Equipment assembled from foreign components was sold to state institutions as domestic, and the damage to the state exceeded 4.5 billion tenge.
After committing the crimes the suspect went into hiding and was put on an international wanted list; in March this year he was detained in Georgia, from where he was extradited to Kazakhstan at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office. He is now in a pre-trial detention centre. The charges carry up to ten years in prison with confiscation of property. Since the start of the year seven people have been extradited from Georgia, five of them wanted for embezzlement.
What it means: The case is not simply fraud but a substitution of origin: equipment made from imported components was sold to hospitals as Kazakhstani, giving a tender advantage. The office did not disclose the suspect’s name or the company.
What we know now: The suspect is in a detention centre and the investigation continues; there has been no trial yet, so guilt is not proven. What happened to the equipment sold and at which institutions it works the office did not say.
Background: Extradition is the handing over of a person by one state to another for criminal prosecution or to serve a sentence. The status of a domestic manufacturer gives advantages in public procurement, which is why obtaining it on false information is described in the statement as a scheme for winning tenders.
