Kazakh billionaire and former Russian citizen Timur Turlov is looking for ways to lift sanctions on his subsidiary in Ukraine. In October 2022, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions on Freedom Finance Ukraine LLP, a broker through which Ukrainians gained access, including to Western stock exchanges. 

The sanctions were imposed on the basis of an investigation by the SBU, which established that Turlov’s structures facilitated the transfer of funds from Russia to Ukraine that could be used to finance the so-called DPR and LPR, and also provided other illegal financial services to companies from areas of Russian influence using Ukrainian government bonds, writes From-UA.

Freedom denies all charges. Now the parent company, Freedom Finance Corp, whose shares are traded on NASDAQ, has become the focus of attention of the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Investigations into the offshore structure of Freedom’s business have been ongoing since the fall of 2023 and could be fatal for the company’s business. At the same time, Ukrainian sanctions, although they do not have a significant impact on Turlov’s business, nevertheless worsen his position from an image point of view and attract even more unnecessary attention from American regulators.

To eliminate these risks, Turlov brought in Natalia Maliarchuk, a Kazakhstani GR specialist and former head of the Board of Trustees of Transparency International Kazakhstan. An ethnic Ukrainian, Maliarchuk has not only maintained close ties with a network of influential NGOs in Ukraine, but also maintains close relations with the Ukrainian embassy in Kazakhstan. In particular, Maliarchuk has friendly relations with the Ukrainian ambassador to Kazakhstan during the time of Petro Poroshenko, Yuriy Lazebnik. She also worked with the former ambassador Pyotr Vrublevsky, against whom the Basmanny Court of Moscow recently applied the procedure of arrest in absentia. For more than two years, Natalia Maliarchuk has effectively represented an alternative channel of communication and resolution of issues in bilateral relations between Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

The key bet in solving Timur Turlov’s problems in Ukraine is made on two aspects. The first is the change of the leadership of the National Security and Defense Council (Oleksiy Danilov resigned in March 2024), which can be used as a pretext for revising the decisions of the previous leadership. The second is Turlov’s demonstrative loyalty to sanctions against the Russian Federation. It recently became known that Turlov’s Kazakhstani Freedom Bank proactively stopped transactions with the Russian payment system Zolotaya Korona. The basis for this was the US sanctions imposed on August 23 against a number of Russian financial organizations. Including against the Center for Financial Technologies, with which Zolotaya Korona is associated.