Photo: Muaiad Elameen / Pexels
Kazakhstan will set up a state commission to oversee budget spending on construction, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said on November 13 (kursiv.media). Its membership is due to be published early next week. The government and oversight bodies must propose measures to tackle corruption in state-owned companies by November 24.
What happened
Tokayev spoke at a working meeting of the Security Council focused on transport and logistics. The president demanded that roads and public facilities be built to proper standards.
He also said corrupt networks posed a threat to “People’s Construction.” According to the president, they are planning to discredit and derail construction.
“We will, of course, not allow that,” Tokayev said.
What this means
The commission will oversee how budget money is spent on construction. This ties into oversight of construction spending, which raem.kz has previously covered.
Tokayev said the Prosecutor General’s Office had secured the recovery of more than 1.3 trillion tenge in illegally acquired assets. The money was allocated to 466 public facilities and infrastructure projects. Of these, 383 have already been completed.
One detail matters here: the instruction also covers construction quality. The president singled out roads and called corruption risks one of the main problems facing state-owned companies.
State-owned companies must keep operating
The meeting followed reports of the detention of executives at Samruk-Kazyna and KTZ. Tokayev stressed that the heads of national companies were personally accountable. He said senior positions did not entitle anyone to exemptions from the law.
The president ordered that Samruk-Kazyna, KTZ and other companies continue operating without interruption. The Samruk-Kazyna fund said it was operating as usual and providing law enforcement agencies with the materials they requested. The fund said its commitments to investors remained in force.
The next step is to announce the commission’s membership early in the week. By November 24, the government and oversight bodies must submit specific proposals to reduce corruption offences and improve the efficiency of state-owned companies.
