*ISLAMABAD – The jailed daughter of Uzbekistan’s former leader has beggedhis successor to release her after claiming she gave more than $1.0 billionto the state, while an anti-fraud ruling in her former home of Switzerlanddeepened her troubles.*
Gulnara Karimova, the 46-year-old daughter of the late strongman IslamKarimov, was sentenced to a decade behind bars by an Uzbek court in 2017 onfraud and money-laundering charges.
In a statement via Instagram on Sunday she stopped short of acknowledgingguilt but apologised to the people of the Central Asian nation for“disappointment that I might have brought”.
The former diplomat and popstar said she had given more than $1.2 billion(one billion euros) of her “personal assets” to the state “in the interestof the republic’s budget”.
The Russian-language story shared on her daughter Iman Karimova’s Instagrampage also said Karimova and her legal team had relinquished claims to $686million kept in foreign banks.
“It’s authentic,” Karimova’s Swiss lawyer Gregoire Mangeat told AFP of theInstagram post on Monday, while declining to comment on its contents.*First foreign ruling*
Karimova’s apparent appeal came on the eve of an announcement by the Swissattorney general on Monday that Switzerland had sent 130 million Swissfrancs ($133 million) to Uzbekistan formerly held in bank accounts in theEuropean country.
The move follows a first conviction in an anti-corruption investigation inSwitzerland in which Karimova is believed to have been a central figure.
The Swiss attorney general said the return of funds followed a Swisscourt’s conviction of an unnamed “relative of Gulnara Karimova”.
The male relative was accused of moving money around bank accounts “toprevent the origin and actual destination of the funds from beingidentified,” the attorney general said in a statement.
“He also signed false bank documents in order to conceal the identity ofthe true owner of the funds, Gulnara Karimova,” the statement said.
The attorney general’s office said the verdict handed to the relative — a390,000 franc fine or a 130-day prison sentence — reflected the fact thathe was already serving a heavy sentence in Uzbekistan.
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Karimova was Uzbekistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations inGeneva from 2008 to 2017.
Her problems in Uzbekistan began in 2014 when her father was still aliveand she was reportedly placed under house arrest after hurling insults ather mother and sister on Twitter.
In 2018 a court commuted Karimova’s sentence to five years under housearrest.
But in March this year Uzbek prosecutors said she had been returned to jailfor repeatedly violating conditions of her house arrest.
In 2017, prosecutors said Karimova was a member of an “organised criminalgroup” that controlled assets worth more than $1.3 billion in 12 countries.
Karimova has also been the subject of a multi-year corruption probetargeting Western telecoms firms.
US and European investigators say the firms paid her billions of dollars tosecure access to the Uzbek market.
President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took power after the death of Karimov,Uzbekistan’s long-reigning hardliner, in 2016.
He has won plaudits for reining in many of his predecessor’s authoritarianexcesses but has kept a repressive political system intact. -APP/AFP
