On Thursday, Bishkek city’s Birinchi Mai district court delivered a verdict upholding a previous ruling that sentenced Kyrgyzstan’s former Prime Minister Sapar Isakov to 18 years in prison on corruption charges. On 9 June, the court had deemed Isakov guilty of misappropriating state funds that were allocated for renovations of a hippodrome in Cholpon-Ata and the capital’s National History Museum while he was in office. At the time of the June verdict, Isakov was already in serving his 15-year prison sentence for previous corruption charges regarding his involvement in a Bishkek Thermal Power Station project in 2013, for which he was sentenced in December 2019.
Isakov’s lawyer, Bakytbek Avtandil told the press that the ruling was announced via video link due to the pandemic. Initially, the court had issued a fresh sentence of 12 years, but the judge ruled that, “in aggregate, taking into account his earlier conviction and prison sentence of 15 years, Isakov shall be sentenced to 18 years in a high-security penitentiary”. The former leader is also supposed to pay nearly $3.3 million in fines.
The Kyrgyz government’s recent crackdowns on high-profile elites have emerged from tensions between incumbent President Sooronbay Jeenbekov and Almazbek Atambayev, his former ally and predecessor. Jeenbekov served as prime minister for Atambayev between April 2016 and August 2017. Until he replaced Jeenbekov as Prime Minister, Isakov served as a presidential administration chief for Atambayev’s government, with a special focus on the country’s foreign investments. Isakov denies all charges laid out against him, having served as Prime Minister for only 8 months until April 2018.
Atambayev himself is currently imprisoned on charges of illegally releasing a high profile Chechen criminal Aziz Batukaev, and is serving an 11-year jail sentence. Among other things, Atambayev is still on trial for alleged involvement in the killing of a special ops officer in 2019. The former President has denied all charges and refuses to testify. His lawyers insist that his status as a former head of state should award him immunity from prosecution, but the leader’s former party, the Social Democratic Party (SDPK), which holds a majority in Parliament, stripped him of those rights in 2019. Now, the issue seems to have been turned into a media trial due to the pandemic.
Most analysts believe that the current political climate in Kyrgyzstan, where the courts seem to be bending to the whims of the administration, will ensure that Atambayev is convicted in his second trial as well.