According to our sources, Kazakh oligarch Patokh Chodiev has the US corporate intelligence firm GlobalSource, headed by Bill Hutman, helping him to navigate his way through the various ongoing anticorruption probes into his business affairs. His son-in-law Victor Hanna is also a client of the firm.
Chodiev is being investigated in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom for money laundering, contract fixing, bribery and corruption. Mark Hollingsworth, consultant and discredited journalist working with the London-based corporate intelligence firm Alaco are now desperately trying to launder his reputation and shift the blame for his alleged crimes onto his other co-founders.
Hollingsworth has set up a reputation laundering website along with his long-term partner Peter Van Niekerk.
It is not the first time that GlobalSource, which has a very active office in Cyprus, has looked out for Chodiev's interests. In 2012, Andrey Melnichenko's company Eurochem filed a lawsuit against its former partner International Mineral Resources (IMR), claiming damages of $1 billion. Chodiev was one of IMR's main shareholders.
GlobalSource investigated the origin of leaked internal documents from IMR that were published in the press. To recover a copy of the hacked data, GlobalSource found itself confronted with lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, a consultant for Eurochem who had been sold the stolen documents by former disgraced Kazakh Prime Minister, Akezhan Kazhegeldin. Today Akhmetshin is embroiled in the Congressional probe into Moscow's alleged interference in the US elections.
