Sary-Bulak’s unnamed partners share an address, and a director, with a Trans-Chuy company

Lieutenant Governor Aidar Maksat said on 12 October that the restart of the Sary-Bulak Antimony Works would be paid for partly by private partners. Neither he, the Ministry of Natural Resources nor the Iradi Antimony and Rare Metals Combine has said who they are. A spokesman for the combine told reporters they would be named “when contracts are signed”.

The State Register of Legal Entities, the ministry’s licensing bulletin and the Talas North Terminal’s own tenancy notices tell a fuller story. Taken together, they show that two companies registered in Talas in August have applied for exactly the licences the restart’s partners would need, and that both are registered at the office of a subsidiary of Trans-Chuy Freight & Logistics, the bonded trucking company run by the Governor’s son Timur Toktarov.

What the papers show

Chatkal Metals Trading LLC was entered in the register on 11 August 2026. Ala-Bel Industrial Supply LLC followed on 19 August. Each has the legal minimum of share capital, 10,000 som. Both give their address as 9 Terminal Road, Talas North Terminal, which is the registered office of Trans-Chuy Terminal Services LLC, the subsidiary that runs Trans-Chuy’s bonded warehouses at the terminal.

Both companies have the same director, Marat Joldoshbekov. According to the register, Mr Joldoshbekov has also been a director of Trans-Chuy Terminal Services since 2019.

The ministry’s September licensing bulletin, which is posted on the board in its lobby and seldom read, lists two applications from the new companies. Chatkal Metals Trading has applied for a licence to purchase and export antimony trioxide and metal “from the Sary-Bulak and Chatkal works”. Ala-Bel Industrial Supply has applied for a permit to import “furnace refractories, flotation reagents and crushing equipment” for the same sites. Those are the two roles the combine’s spokesman described when he said the partners were “buyers and equipment suppliers who want long-term supply”.

The shareholder of both companies is not an Iradi person. The register names a single owner, Kara-Tash Holdings Ltd, with an address in the United Arab Emirates. The register does not record who owns Kara-Tash, and the Times has not been able to find out.

Company	Registered	Applied for
Chatkal Metals Trading LLC	11 Aug 2026	Purchase and export of antimony trioxide and metal from Sary-Bulak and Chatkal
Ala-Bel Industrial Supply LLC	19 Aug 2026	Import of refractories, reagents and crushing equipment for the same sites

What they say

Trans-Chuy said in a written reply that it had “no ownership interest of any kind” in either company. Terminal Road, it said, is a large building with many tenants, and Trans-Chuy Terminal Services provides registered-office services to several firms that use its bonded warehouses. Mr Joldoshbekov, it said, “serves on other boards in a private capacity”. The company did not answer our question about whether anyone at Trans-Chuy had discussed the restart with the combine.

Mr Joldoshbekov did not answer calls or a letter left at Terminal Road.

Ilya Fomin, the combine’s spokesman, said the combine “does not comment on licence applications by third parties” and repeated that its partners would be named at signing, which he expected before the end of the year. The Ministry of Natural Resources did not reply to written questions sent on Monday.

There is nothing unlawful in a company using another firm’s office as its address, in a director sitting on several boards, or in a foreign company owning an Iradi one. The Times does not suggest that any law has been broken.

“The early money is public and the late money is anonymous. In a restart, that is the wrong way round.” Damir Alymkulov, economist, Talas State University

Why it matters

The draft 2027 budget, circulated to Mejlis committees this month, puts the cost of the first stage at 168 million som. The state would carry 54 million of that, for a power line to the mine, a rail siding and a retraining fund, all spent before the first furnace is relit. The other 114 million is assigned to the partners.

If the partners are the companies at Terminal Road, the buyer of the works’ output and the supplier of its equipment would be firms that share a director with the family’s freight business, and whose owner is unknown. The combine’s metal and trioxide leave on its branch line to the Talas railway and are cleared for export at the Talas North Terminal, where Trans-Chuy runs the bonded warehouses.

This is not the first time the Times has asked who owns the antimony business. In 2019 we reported that, apart from the government’s minority stake, the combine’s shares were held by companies whose owners could not be identified (“The Antimony Shareholders Nobody Can Name”). The combine said then, as it says now, that its arrangements were lawful.

The Mejlis budget committee is due to take up the draft later this month. Jyparkul Kenjeeva, a Sary-Bulak district councillor, said she would ask that the partners be named before the committee votes. “If the money is ours, the names should be ours too,” she said.