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Kaspi and Russian Sanctions

edited October 27 in Not Football

Has anyone picked up on this yet?:

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/10/26/2969694/0/en/Joint-Stock-Company-Kaspi-kz-Announcement-If-You-Have-Suffered-Losses-in-Joint-Stock-Company-Kaspi-kz-NASDAQ-KSPI-You-Are-Encouraged-to-Contact-The-Rosen-Law-Firm-About-Your-Rights.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rferl.org/amp/kaspi-bank-kazakhstan-toqaev-lomtadze-kim-nasdaq-culper/33131206.html

The report mentioned in those articles can be accessed here:

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b8d77f25ab/downloads/4147ea18-c5e3-4426-8c1f-a74f1c521777/Culper_KSPI_9-19-24.pdf?ver=1726752239297

It seems that our owners may have some pretty shady links to Russia that haven't been disclosed before. I can't really find much else about it online though. Anyone with more economics expertise than me able to comment? The linked report is pretty detailed and contains some "interesting" claims

Comments

  • Culper seems to be an organisation that shorts businesses on the stock market (effectively gambling that their stock price will fall) and then publishes research critical of those businesses in order to drive down the share price (and is open about all of this in their report.) This doesn’t mean what’s in the report is incorrect, but they themselves appear pretty shady.

    I’m not speaking from a position of any knowledge or authority but it wouldn’t surprise me if a major financial institution based in the former USSR had significant links to Russian money.

  • I completely agree with your last point about a near inevitability that a financial institution in Kazakhstan will have significant Russian links. However, if the report is correct, they appear to be actively courting post-Ukraine-invasion Russian investment, unlike many of their competitor banks in Kazakhstan who have complied with Western sanctions? Moreover, there appears to be a lack of transparency about many of these Russian links (and that's a charitable take. A less charitable person would say that Kaspi has been lying).

    Hopefully I'm just being gullible about a well-spun report...

  • edited October 27

    Kaspi met the listing requirements for the London Stock Exchange and for Nasdaq.

    If they haven’t uncovered any issues with the company, I dare say we will not on a football forum.

    Clearly what happens when our owner doesn’t wish to or cannot continue funding what must be very significant losses is plainly a major risk.

    Nothing we supporters can realistically do to assess likelihood of that risk or to mitigate that risk however.

  • edited October 28

    Lets be brutally blunt here, Culper have form for punting out adverse reports off the back of them taking a short position in the targets of their reports. The report is light on verifiable information & heavy on "we believes".

    Rosen are notorious ambulance chasers...

    God help the major financial institutions of the USA & Western World if anyone did a thorough investigation into their customer lists & transactions, they are all guilty of dealings with politically sensitive or exposed persons & institutions. There is a reason that the City of London is considered to be the money laundering capital of the world...

    Equally, many of our leading political figures are guilty of taking Russian money over the last 10 years or so; or Israeli, or...

    I speak from experience of having worked in the City for almost 40 years including time at some of the largest merchant/investment banks in the world.

    Having said all of that I am fairly sure that with enough digging evidence will be found of Kaspi's links to Russian money etc. Given its principle location I would be very surprised if it didn't.

  • So, we've gone from a Trump supporter to links to Putin...

  • Two down, one to go.

  • Is there such a thing as a billionaire who doesn't have shady links to Russia?

  • Or a politician for that matter.

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