Assembly stopped in 2020
One of the leaders of the Asia Auto – Bipek Auto group of companies, Anatoly Balushkin, was detained in Prague by the local police, as reported by informburo.kz.
The Department of Economic Investigation for the East Kazakhstan region initiated a search, the detainee is accused of fraud on an especially large scale.
The Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2020 terminated the industrial assembly agreement with the Asia Auto – Bipek Auto group of companies. As a result, the latter had to return the invested funds within 10 years.
A year later, Asia Auto – Bipek Auto lost a lawsuit against the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and Anatoly Balushkin, who was the controlling shareholder of the group, was put on the international wanted list.
“Asia Auto – Bipek Auto” was engaged in the assembly of Lada, Skoda, KIA and Chevrolet cars in Kazakhstan, but production stopped in 2020. Anatoly Balushkin commented on the situation in an interview he gave earlier this year:
The main points of the whole story are as follows: there is a company that created the automotive industry in Kazakhstan from scratch, provided 5,000 jobs, built a car assembly plant, built all the main buildings of a full-cycle car plant in partnership with the Russian Avtovaz. But 8 months before the completion of the project, an unprecedented attack on the business began. The profile ministry, contrary to the law, with one of its letters broke the agreement on industrial assembly, then the 15-minute WhatsApp courts took the side of the ministerial ones.
