Kyrgyzstan’s north-south road to corruption, 09 August 2018

On 26 June 2018, the Fergana website published [...] 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 ... 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...