The interview was given to the journalist Ali Toktakunov and published on 13 August. Its subject is the campaign that supplied this government with its founding claim: since 2020, defendants in corruption cases have returned money and property to the state, often voluntarily and before any court ruled. In December 2025 Kamchybek Tashiev, then chairman of the State Committee for National Security, put five years of it at more than 300 billion som, over a thousand properties and 30,000 hectares of land.
Japarov now says the dollar figure that grew out of those claims does not survive contact with the market. His account of the conversation is blunt. My friend, do not play with the figures, he says he told Tashiev; if tomorrow that much does not come out, they will say you ate it all.
The mechanism he describes is valuation. A flat worth 100,000 dollars was booked at 300,000, which inflated the reported recovery and then made the asset impossible to sell. Who will you sell it to for 300,000, he asked, if the market price is 100,000. A revision is under way to establish how much property was actually transferred to the state and how much of it has been sold, and by his account a large number of objects remain unsold.
The campaign that legitimised this government has become a receivable that nobody in Bishkek can value.
He is not disowning the results. The returned assets paid for schools, for refurbished security service buildings in the regions, for a new academy and for sports grounds. I am not saying nothing came in from corruption, that there was no benefit, he said. The benefit was good.
Two things make the admission awkward. Tashiev left the security service earlier this year, so the number is being disputed after its author has gone, and the body auditing the confiscations is the same apparatus that carried them out. No terms of reference have been published, no completion date named, and no figure has been given for what has actually been sold. The former prime minister Akylbek Japarov, interviewed separately by Ydyrys Isakov, said the confiscation policy should be settled through the courts.
The same interview put numbers on the railways. Japarov said the 64 kilometre Balykchy to Kochkor line cost 64 million dollars, or about 955,000 dollars a kilometre, against tender bids of five to six million; that the line onward to Kara-Keche, Makmal and Manas needs investors because tunnels are what consume the money; and that the China to Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan route could earn the country 400 to 500 million dollars a year in transit alone. That estimate has never been published with a methodology behind it.
One arithmetic note the interview does not make. At Thursday’s rate of 87.45 som to the dollar, Tashiev’s 300 billion som is about 3.4 billion dollars, not four. The president is disputing a figure that is already larger than the one his security chief actually gave, which tells you how loosely both numbers have been circulating.