McDonald’s has announced that it will suspend its activities in Kazakhstan from Friday, citing supply problems in this Central Asian country where the franchises of the American fast-food chain belong to an oligarch close to the former president.
This announcement comes a few days before a presidential election in Kazakhstan, in a context where the current leader, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, says he wants to reduce the influence of the clan of his predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to which the owner of McDonald’s belongs. Kazakhs.
In a press release, McDonald’s, present for more than six years in Kazakhstan, announces ‘suspending from (Friday) November 18 the work of its restaurants due to difficulties in supplies’, without providing more details.
The 24 McDonald’s restaurants in six Kazakh cities are operated by the TOO Food Solutions KZ franchise, owned according to Forbes and local media to Kairat Boranbayev, an oligarch close to Mr. Nazarbayev who was arrested in March for ’embezzlement’.
According to Forbes, this 56-year-old man was in 2021 the 14th richest person in Kazakhstan.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, candidate for re-election on Sunday, has promised to get rid of the oligarchic system set up by Nursultan Nazarbayev and of which Mr. Boranbayev is a representative.
Since bloody riots that shook the country in January, several relatives of Mr. Nazarbayev have been arrested or dismissed.
In March, Mr. Boranbayev was accused of ’embezzlement of a particularly large amount of funds in the semi-public sector’ and placed in preventive detention for two months.
It was not immediately possible to know whether he was still in detention.
In August, the anti-corruption agency of Kazakhstan also estimated in a report that the land on which a McDonald’s restaurant had been built in the city of Karaganda (center) had been obtained at an unreasonably low price.
In its press release Thursday, McDonald’s insists on the fact that it has paid more than three billion tenge, the local currency, in taxes (about 6.3 million francs) and donated 80 million to charities.
/ATS