Kazakhstani authorities canceled auction to sell Azia Avto

A private bailiff has called out a distrained property of Azia Avto in Ust-Kamenogorsk from an auction. The auction was initiated to sell the production site of the company and pay off its debt to Jusan Bank. The auction was canceled when the court received a letter of complaint from Anatoly Balushkin, a founder of Azia Avto.

According to data from a bailiff, the starting price of the manufacturing site was about $11.8 million. To take part in the auction its participants were also obliged to pay $594,347 as a security deposit.

The authorities cited Balushkin’s letter of complaint as justification for the cancelation of the auction. As the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan data shows, the additional hearing of the argument between Jusan Bank and Azia Avto was launched on May 4. However, no new documents were published.

The sale of the car assembly plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk should have helped to decrease the company’s debt to the bank. The total sum of the debt BIPEK Group owes to Jusan Bank is more than $147.6 million.

Both sides have been arguing for the past two years. The bank representatives have brought a legal case against Anatoly Balushkin and a company called Energokholod. They argue that in 2020 the entrepreneur sold 10% of Azia Avto stocks and 10% of BIPEK Avto stocks to the Russian company Energokholod for about $5.9 million.

The bank’s lawyers brought the case before the court; they insisted that the deal was illegal because all those stocks were pledged as security against the bank’s loans. The judge of the Ust-Kamenogorsk court Asemgul Kasenova supported these arguments and acknowledged both stock purchase agreements as illegal.

Last year the Kazakhstani government issued a wanted notice for Anatoly Balushkin. Kazakhstan even asked their Russian counterparts to extradite the businessman but the Russian Office of the Prosecutor General refused to do so.