On October 7, 2021, the Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Regulation and Development of Financial Market (ARDFM) published a list of entities with signs of illegal activity in the territory of Kazakhstan. There are 121 organizations on the list including FFIN Brokerage Services Inc., which insists that it never received any requests from the agency and now wants to clarify the situation.
According to FFIN Brokerage Services, the «black list» published by ARDFM consists of entities that have never been regulated by the Kazakhstani agency. But the agency has received some complaints from unidentified clients. FFIN Brokerage Services Inc. was registered in Belize on July 23, 2014 under the number of 147,343 and has the following licenses:
• to operate securities trading (No.000265/81);
• to process international payments (No.000265/82);
• to operate international money transfers (No.000265/243)
The company has published all audited financial reports on the ffin.bz website.
FFIN Brokerage Services Inc. has no representative offices in the Republic of Kazakhstan and provides its Kazakhstani clients with services remotely. The company fully complies with all rules and requirements of the jurisdiction where it operates.
The company serves more than 50,000 clients all over the world including Kazakhstan. All these clients can easily open their accounts on distance. Signing a contract with a foreign company is legal in Kazakhstan and does not contradict the country’s legislation.
At the same time, there are two Freedom Holding Corp. subsidiaries in Kazakhstan: JSC Freedom Finance and Freedom Finance Global PLC.; they operate in their proper jurisdictions.
JSC Freedom Finance (license No.3.2.238/15 from October 2, 2018, issued by the National Bank of Kazakhstan) offers its clients brokerage services on KASE and AIX, services of market maker, dealing activities on the securities market; and investment portfolio management and consulting. As of October 1, 2021, the company served 75,000 client accounts.
Freedom Finance Global PLC has a license (AFSA-A-LA-2020-0019) issued by the Astana Financial Services Authority, (AFSA). The company has direct access to stock exchange transactions on international finance markets (NYSE/NASDAQ, LSE, MCX and SPB Exchange, HKEX,) as well as exclusive access to IPOs while guaranteeing the reliability of any transaction under English law. As of October 1, 2021, there were more than 21,000 accounts in the company.
