ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Once an extremely powerful man in Kazakhstan, Bolat Nazarbaev, the younger brother of Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, died on November 13 at the age of 70, after reportedly suffering a lengthy illness.
The spokeswoman of the Central Clinic in Almaty, Polina Shimanskaya, told RFE/RL that Bolat Nazarbaev was pronounced dead “at 9:51 this morning after a long illness.”
She did not elaborate but media reports have said Nazarbaev was hospitalized earlier in November in Almaty after suffering a heart attack.
In June 2022, local media said Bolat Nazarbaev was fighting a longtime illness and a video showing him in a wheelchair appeared on YouTube at the time.
The reports coincided with a statement from Kazakhstan’s Financial Monitoring Agency saying Bolat Nazarbaev and his former wife, Maira Qurmanghalieva, were targeted by a lawsuit filed by the owners of the financial services company Karuan, who accused them of illegally taking over the firm.
In March, a court in Kazakhstan ordered Bolat Nazarbaev, who sold 31.9 percent of the industrial facility’s shares to a private company in 2009 but continued to control the factory’s operations, to regain the shares and return them to the state.
AZTM used to be state property but was privatized in 1998 with 31.9 percent of its shares obtained by the private company Temir Kon. In 2007, Temir Kon sold the shares to Bolat Nazarbaev.
In 1986, Bolat Nazarbaev’s brother, Nursultan, who ruled the oil-rich Central Asian country for nearly 30 years before he stepped down more than four years ago, said in an interview to a Moscow-based Soviet magazine, Druzhba narodov (Peoples’ Friendship), that his younger brother worked as a plumber.
In 1989, after Nursultan Nazarbaev took over the then-Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, Bolat Nazarbaev was already working as a deputy director of a state bakery in the town of Qaskelen. During the decades of his brother’s presidency, Bolat Nazarbaev became one of the…
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