Compliance Perspectives

By Adam Turteltaub Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan were all born out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. With large energy deposits of national gas, many global companies and their suppliers are operating within these countries. To better understand the compliance risks there, we spoke with Timur Khasanov-Batirov, a compliance officer with deep and wide roots in the region. While we may think of this area as one region, he warns that there are substantial differences by country. Kazakhstan is the most developed, and compliance has gained significant traction in large companies, primarily in the oil and gas sector. Uzbekistan saw three major FCPA cases, and, as a result, compliance has garnered a great deal of attention. The other three countries have much smaller economies and less developed compliance cultures. In addition, Turkmenistan has a fairly-closed economy, which complicates the picture. While it is easy to focus on the anticorruption risk in the region, there