Reportedly, high-profile government officials and business leaders were involved in a portion of the illicit mining activities, and the sibling of the former Kazakhstan President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is alleged to be among the perpetrators.
A statement from the Kazakhstan government issued on Tuesday confirmed that an additional 106 mining operations have been shut down due to the efforts of authorities to crack down on illegal cryptocurrency mining activities.
The results from the investigations of Kazakhstan’s financial watchdog and other agencies of the government with jurisdiction on the matter show that 51 mining operations were forcibly shut down while 55 others willingly complied. As per the government statement, the former are alleged to have participated in illegally putting equipment in special economic zones as well as tax evasion.
The very same results showed that high-profile individuals in the private sector and government spearheaded several of the illicit crypto mining operations, including the chairman of the Central Asian Electric Power Corp. Alexander Klebanov, and the sibling of the former president of the country Nursultan Nazarbayev, Bolat Nazarbayev. The former is responsible for providing over 2 million people with electricity. Among the suspected individuals was also the 17th richest man in Kazakhstan, Kiarat Itegmenov.
Since fall 2021, Kazakhstan has been experiencing acute power outages, owing in part to an inflow of crypto miners from China since the crackdown in spring of the same year, but to infrastructure breakdowns as well. To address the energy crisis, the administration has chosen to put the squeeze in unauthorized miners operating in the country.
As shown in the statement, the financial monitoring watchdog has initiated 25 criminal charges and seized 67,000 devices worth 100 billion tenge, equivalent to $193 million.
The authorities announced in the last week of February that it had discovered 202 megawatts of illegitimate cryptocurrency mining farms.