Kazakhstani Oligarch Eduard Ogai Looted Cash to Buy $100M+ of U.S. Properties:

When Prince Nawaf bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud sold his $75 million triplex in the Heritage at Trump Place building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the anonymous buyer of the 10,500-square-foot manse, complete with a hair salon, a sushi bar, and three bulletproof panic rooms, was a mystery.

A real estate listing deemed the home ideal for a “member of the global elite.” The new resident would walk upon slabs of sumptuous Tuscan Calacatta marble, glide through doors of Makassar ebony, and sleep beneath ceilings of the finest Venetian plaster. The 2018 sale made headlines; the transaction was co-brokered by Robert De Niro’s son Raphael. However, the purchaser’s true identity remained frustratingly cloaked behind a web of LLCs.

Now, the previously nameless owner of the unit has been revealed as a Kazakhstani oligarch who allegedly stole a coal mine out from under the former Soviet republic’s top opposition leader during his unjust imprisonment on sham political charges, then snatched up the New York City spread at the relative bargain-basement price of $30 million—or, about 7,500 times the average annual household income in Kazakhstan.

That’s according to a bombshell lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast, in which businessman and politician Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, arguably the Eurasian country’s highest-profile pro-democracy dissident, accuses Eduard Ogai, a member of autocratic former President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s “inner circle,” of plundering his mining operation’s assets and pouring them into more than $100 million worth of luxury U.S. real estate.

Zhakiyanov and his wife, Nurbike Zarubekova, allege Ogai, the CEO of Kazakh copper behemoth Kazakhmys, laundered the purloined loot and used it to buy not only the Trump triplex, but another spectacular Upper West Side pied-à-terre for $16 million; a trophy estate in Southern California featuring, among other things, a subterranean 10-car garage; and a 10-bed, 16-bath Italianate megamansion in Beverly Hills previously owned by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. (The property, known as the Hacienda Estate, came complete with a master suite described in 2019 by Variety as “hedonistic,” and a fireplace it deemed “almost comically large.”)

The suit includes a cameo appearance by at least one member of the NHL Hall of Fame, and a slightly larger role played by a New York City official appointed by Mayor Eric Adams.

Reached on Saturday for comment, Zhakiyanov’s New York-based attorney Marc Lindemann said in an email, “We cannot comment on pending litigation; the complaint speaks for itself.”

The surreal saga’s origins can be traced back to the early 1990s, in the heady days of Kazakhstan’s independence from the Soviet Union. Zhakiyanov, a provincial governor and co-founder of the reformist party Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, together with Zarubekova and several associates, founded the mining company STPAKK Semei—eventually reorganized as SK—to work the Karazhyra coal deposit in East Kazakhstan, according to the complaint.

“Under Mr. Zhakiyanov’s leadership, SK discovered and developed the coal deposit from scratch,” the complaint states. “SK built railways and other infrastructure, created hundreds of jobs, and made Karazhyra a profitable enterprise.”

Zhakiyanov, who resides in Kazakhstan but lived in Boston from 2010 to 2014 while earning an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched his political career in 1994. He was first elected as governor of Semipalatinsk, and later won the governorship of Pavlodar Oblast, hard by the Russian border, while his business venture was also taking off.

By 2001, SK had more than 1,000 employees, produced 4.2 million metric tons of coal, with more than a billion metric tons of reserves, and saw annual net profits in excess of $15 million. But during that same period, Zhakiyanov “had become a vocal critic of the autocratic Nazarbayev regime and the corrupt political elite in Kazakhstan,” according to his complaint. “Mr. Zhakiyanov established an opposition movement that held street rallies in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, drawing tens of thousands of people dissatisfied with oligarchic rule and calling for democratic changes in the country.”

The Nazarbayev regime began to see Zhakiyanov as a threat, and set out to silence him, the complaint continues, stating that in April 2002, following “a standoff at the French Embassy in Almaty,” Kazakhstani authorities arrested Zhakiyanov and flew him to an abandoned factory to await trial.

“Following what independent observers described as a Stalinist show trial, Mr. Zhakiyanov was convicted by the Pavlodar City Court in Aug. 2002 on politically motivated charges of abuse of office,” according to the…