Former Agriculture Official Arrested in Raspberry Subsidy Fraud Case

According to the Financial Monitoring Agency (FMA), former deputy Beket Abishev and ex-agriculture official Bauyrzhan Aimbetov profited from a subsidy scheme together, Orda.kz reports.

Bauyrzhan Aimbetov, formerly the Director of the Department for Development of Public Services and Digitalization of the Agro-Industrial Complex at the Ministry of Agriculture, has been placed under arrest for two months.

He is suspected of involvement in fraudulent activities related to state subsidies allocated for raspberry cultivation in the Jambyl and Turkestan regions.

Authorities allege that between 2018 and 2022, Aimbetov participated in a scheme organized by Beket Abishev, a former deputy of the Almaty region maslikhat, aimed at misappropriating public funds.

Abishev and Aimbetov, using electronic digital signatures of 29 farms and documents on the fictitious delivery of seedlings of an elite variety of raspberry, received subsidies totaling more than 1.5 billion tenge, the FMA statement said.

Beket Abishev was arrested a month earlier. In 2022, Orda.kz reported on farmers' complaints about the deputy’s role in allocating raspberry subsidies.

Original Author: Igor Ulitin