The Antimony Shareholders Nobody Can Name

The Iradi Antimony and Rare Metals Combine reported revenue of about $120 million last year and is, after NurGaz, the largest taxpayer in the ISEZ. It owns the Sary-Bulak mine and the Chatkal smelter. Since 2009 the ISEZ government has held a minority stake that gives it a veto over major transactions. The Times has spent four months trying to find out who owns the rest.

The combine is a closed joint-stock company and does not publish its shareholder register. Its 2018 annual report says the remaining shares are held by “institutional investors”. Filings at the State Register of Legal Entities show three holding companies, all registered in Talas between 2008 and 2010, each with nominee directors. Their own shareholders are companies in Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and the Seychelles, where registers are not public.

One of the three Talas holding companies gives as its address a suite on Metallurgy Avenue in the combine’s own headquarters. Another shares a nominee director with a company that held a concession in the 2007 partition drafts.

No one will say

The Ministry of Natural Resources, which sits on the combine’s supervisory board, said shareholder information was “commercially confidential”. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry said it had “no record beyond the register”. The combine said its shareholders were “lawful investors who have kept Irad’s antimony industry alive through difficult years”, and that the government’s veto “protects the national interest”.

Opposition deputies have alleged that the holding companies are linked to figures in the DPI. The combine denies it. Without the register, no one can prove it either way, which is the point of not publishing one.