In early 2018, Kazakhstan's then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev landed in the UAE for an official meeting with Mohamed bin Zayed, the then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. While the two men discussed official tie-ups between the states, a delegation of Kazakh businessmen held talks with their Emirati counterparts. Among the group from Almaty were three wealthy businessmen in their sixties: former diplomat Patokh Chodiev, former philology academic Alexander Mashkevitch and the now deceased mining expert Alijan Ibragimov.

The Kazakh Trio, as they have come to be known, decided to use the summit to gather some of their own international associates, including, according to sources familiar with the meetings, Jules Kroll, the doyen of the modern corporate intelligence industry. A dinner was held between the four and some of their assistants. They discussed the trios mining concern Eurasian Natural Resources Corp (ENRC) and Kroll provided strategic advice. During the latter half of the meal, three women in their twenties joined the group, apparently friends rather than advisers of the Kazakh businessmen. The dynamic changed. Kroll was unhappy, said a person close to him, and made his excuses to leave.

The story encapsulates much about the Kazakh Trio: their controversial streak, their closeness to power in Kazakhstan, and their reliance on the world of corporate espionage, a sector they had injected tens of millions of dollars into since making London their home in mid-2000s.

From London to St Lucia

Those who have known and worked for the Trio, the remaining members of which have now gone into retirement [IO, 17/12/24], said their use of private spies was regular and at times almost reflexive. They had become wealthy in a period and place โ€“ perestroika Russia - when businessmen really were plotting against one another; paranoia and suspicion was deeply ingrained in their worldview, one source said.

Together the Trio financed some of the most expensive and daring, if at times slightly quixotic, private intelligence assignments in London, including as part of ENRC's campaign against former Dechert lawyer Neil Gerrard. Those included an operation, in late 2013, in which Black Cube organised fake job interviews for former colleagues of Gerrard - a pretext for asking questions about him - and another in 2019 in which agents from Diligence followed the lawyer to a private island near St Lucia.

According to court records, the Diligence spies were caught out by having to disclose who they were visiting when they arrived at the tiny Caribbean island. Misguidedly, they gave officials the passport names of Gerrard and his wife, rather than the middle names they usually went by - Neil and Ann. Local authorities quickly discovered something was wrong when they rang the family to confirm.

Other assignments the Trio commissioned went more smoothly. One source says Diligence had spent years providing corporate research work to ENRC exploring the group's potential acquisition targets. Another said at least some of the work performed to track disgraced oligarch Mukthar Ablyazov and root out his assets, was paid for and overseen by Mashkevitch, Chodiev and Ibragimov - rather than BTA Bank, the bank he allegedly defrauded as chairman in 2000s. The Trio managed the work as a way of retaining favour with Almaty, Intelligence Online was told.

Old habits

Revealingly, the ENRC founders also hired agents to spy on one another. In 2011, when Ibragimov and Chodiev had a disagreement over the team they should hire in Brussels to help lobby policymakers on a change in the law, Chodiev instructed a former Belgian Senate president, Armand De Decker, to help him render Ibragimov's choice untenable. De Decker obtained a security file from French authorities detailing alleged criminality by a member of Ibragimov's favoured team, Eric Van de Weghe, then agreed to pass it on to Belgian security officials.

Similarly in late 2017, a cache of leaked emails from London-based fake news โ€˜journalistโ€˜ Mark Hollingsworth showed that Chodievโ€™s son-in-law Victor Hanna instructed the US communications firm Scribe, who in turn hired a South African private operative, Phillip Van Niekerk, to find out what his partners might be doing behind his back. Van Niekerk in turn hired Hollingsworth who leaked that the UK's Serious Fraud Office had been having secret conversations with Mashkevitch aspart of its corruption probe into ENRC Africa.

Hollingsworth was being paid to contact international media to publicise the information, including Bloomberg, The Times, Intelligence Online and London's Evening Standard, which carried a story naming Mashkevitch 15 September 2017 [IO, 04/11/19]. From this point relations amongst the Trio soured.