Both his parents were civil servants, his father having been severely injured and become an invalid in the Second World War, young Victor moved to Almaty after finishing the College of Industry and Technology in Oskemen.
[5] Khrapunov's name has been connected with a vast number of construction and real estate frauds in and around Almaty—in particular involving the now defunct KUAT Holding, which left dozens of residential and commercial space projects unfinished and in a virtual state of bankruptcy.
Khrapunov's role, according to later statements on behalf of the judicial authorities, is supposed to have consisted of redrawing frontier lines between plots of land belonging to different property right holders.
Apart from rendering favours to "befriended" project developers, Khrapunov had his own business network, controlled by proxy through nominal ownership by his relatives—still according to judicial investigators.
Through fake privatisations in the form of swaps consisting of capital injections against property rights of public entities, holding assets such as nursery schools, homes for the elderly, orchards and even some parts of natural reserves on the outskirts of Almaty were appropriated by the firms controlled by the Khrapunovs, while other plots were taken through tender leaks.
[6] According to prosecutors' findings sent into the public domain in early 2012, back in 2004, shortly after Viktor Khrapunov had left his job as mayor of Almaty, 46.4 million US dollars and 7.7 million euro were transferred from Leyla Khrapunova's account at the Eurasia Bank, the property of three of Kazakhstan's richest oligarchs Alexander Maskevich, Alizhan Ibrahimov and Patokh Chodiyev, to accounts in unnamed Swiss banks on the name of Elvira Belmadani, alias Elvira Viktorovna Khrapunova, the daughter from the ex-mayor's first marriage.
Their collateral consisted of stock in a skeleton enterprise, apparently without any benchmark share price but at the same time the nominal holder of the construction contract for the new terminal of the Almaty international airport.
[11] The UK High Court issued a judgment on Ilyas Khrapunov with a $500 million fine for allegedly aiding Mukhtar Ablyazov violate a court-ordered asset freeze.
The freight's description on the bill of loading read "personal belongings" of Viktor and Leyla Khrapunov, and reputedly included antiques, jewelry, works of art and other highly valuable items.
On 11 December 2011, Khrapunov in an interview with Le Temps claimed that his resignation from his post in Almaty had to do with his ideas of the city's industrial and commercial development, which appeared to clash with the national government's concept, accusing the latter of "oligarchism" to the benefit of few elites at the top.
He also put Bilan's assessment of his and his family's fortune under question, claiming that the property they possessed in and around Geneva was mortgaged—thereby expressing suspicion that in the magazine's calculation assets had simply been added up to liabilities.