"Bribery among low and mid-level officials is part of everyday life and sometimes even transparent," says Freedom House, adding that widespread corruption helps "limit equality of opportunity."
At one time, even Akayev admitted that crime and corruption have firmly settled on the seventh floor of the White House (there are the offices of the president and the prime minister).
Thus, according to the lists of his Ak Zhol party, in 2007, one of the leaders of the southern organized criminal group, Sanzhar Kadyraliev, entered parliament, later shot dead in his office deputy car.
Other leaders of organized criminal groups, Iskender Matraimov, Bayaman Erkinbaev, Rysbek Akmatbaev, Omurbek Bakirov, Ulan Cholponbaev, Bakytbek Zhetigenov, Altynbek Sulaimanov, were also elected to the country's parliament.
Thus, at the expense of the union center, there was a further economic strengthening of the lowest level of the state as a corporation - an enterprise, and the cash flows that the directors could control significantly increased.
A fictitious economy arose and operated, which did not create goods, but the wind of which blew the sails of illegal business well and made it possible to feed well those who were "at the helm of power" not only administrative, but, above all, economic.
As KGB General A.G. Sidorenko recalls, Andropov more than once sent Brezhnev operational materials about the extortion of some party leaders, but usually they returned with a note: "Reported, destroy."
“If in 1986 the right to direct export and import activities was experimentally granted to a limited circle of enterprises and organizations,” it was noted on the pages of Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU, “since April 1, 1989, practically all Soviet state and cooperative enterprises, other organizations received the right to directly export their own products and buy goods for the money earned to develop production and meet the needs of their work collectives. "
There they were converted into dollars, pounds, marks, etc., which made it possible to avoid their depreciation under the influence of "shock therapy", and then, after 1991, to return to Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet republics.
The number of officials in the Soviet Union per 1000 inhabitants: in 1922 there were 5.2; in 1928 - 6.9; in 1940 - 9.5; in 1950 - 10.2; in 1985 - 8.7 An important role in the spread of corruption in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan was the bankruptcy of successfully operating state-owned enterprises and factories and their further privatization at the residual, symbolic value by those in power.
The initial accumulation of capital through appropriation for the symbolic value of state property contributed to the fact that people with a criminal past aspired to power in Kyrgyzstan.
Matuzov noted that "the privileges, abuses, corruption of modern bosses have acquired such forms and scales that even the party officials of the Soviet period did not dream of."
In the book "Goal number one" Mikhail Antonov and the head of the legal department of the Presidential Administration of the Kyrgyz Republic Marat Ukushov assessed corruption in Kyrgyzstan as "total".
[3] Transparency International also compared Kyrgyzstan to the eighteen countries of the Europe and Central Asia region,[Note 1] which collectively scored between 18 and 53, with an average of 35.
[5] Transparency International reported that in 2021 Kyrgyzstan used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to suppress journalism and public assemblies, and that the disposition of COVID-19 relief funds had been concealed.
[6] Experts note that the turnover of the shadow economy is estimated at an average of 60% of the country's GDP, which is about 130 billion soms, since corruption is one of the ways to avoid the established system of taxation and state reporting.
At the same time, some analysts argue that there is no fight against corruption in Kyrgyzstan, arrests of middle-level officials do not violate the bribery system, and no anti-corruption policy has been developed.
[9] One of the major corruption scandals that happened during the presidency of the current leader Sooronbay Jeenbekov is related to Raimbek Matraimov, a former deputy head of the State Customs Service of Kyrgyzstan.
[10] In May 2019 the Kyrgyz edition of Radio Liberty published an investigation, in which journalists claimed that Matraimov earned significant wealth while being part of a corruption scheme during his work as the customs official from 2015 to 2017.
[11] According to the investigation, Matraimov allowed a group of Chinese companies led by the secretive Abdukadyr family bring goods into Kyrgyzstan without paying any customs fees.
[17] There was widespread protest about the supreme court decision to close the case involving the police killing 6 people in Aksy district in March 2001, when President Bakiyev was then Prime Minister.
The Kyrgyzstan parliament made changes to its laws to prevent the officials profiting from the corrupt distribution of hajj pilgrimage places allocated to the country by Saudi Arabia.
During this period, crimes were recorded in the field of land fraud, illegal transfer of state social facilities (in particular, the territory of schools, baths in the village of Kyzyl-Bayrak, part of the Toloykon hospital) into private ownership.
After the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of independent Kyrgyzstan, the "Corruption clans" turned into oligarchic groups, since the representatives of the old party nomenklatura mainly benefited from privatization.
With the collapse of the USSR, the Kyrgyz customs began to introduce gray corruption schemes, develop smuggling, control the supply of drugs from Tajikistan through Kyrgyzstan to Kazakhstan and then to Russia on a systematic basis.
Corrupt leaders of law enforcement agencies controlled the Kyrgyz part of the Northern Route, the supply of Afghan drugs to Russia, China and other countries.
Corrupt officials of the country are engaged in money laundering on an especially large scale, illegally and without declaring they withdraw gold and several billion dollars a year from Kyrgyzstan, without paying taxes and payments to the state budget.