Gulnara Karimova, the imprisoned daughter of Uzbekistan’s late president, caused a ripple of excitement this week by saying she had yielded $1.2 billion to the state coffers, Eurasianet reports.
The Finance Ministry replied on June 27 to say it has no record of any such payment.
“Over the course of last year and in the first half of this year, no incoming amounts of that value have entered the budget,” the ministry said in a statement on its official Facebook account.
In a statement posted on Instagram on June 23, which was confirmed as genuine by her legal representative, Karimova asserted that the money she had been returned to the state had come from “personal assets located in Uzbekistan.”
The Finance Ministry’s denial of Karimova’s massive repayment of cash said to have been acquired through years of engagement in bribery and expropriation was not the only blow to what appears to have all been part of a public relations rehabilitation campaign.
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