A shadowy Uzbek firm with ties to the president's family has scrambled to reanimate its dormant website after a recent RFE/RL investigation revealed it had secured more than $100 million in secretive state gas deals despite having a virtually imperceptible public business footprint.
The RFE/RL exposé published on April 25 found that the company, Ultimo Group Limited, quietly won a 2021 tender to serve as a middleman for at least $36 million in overpriced natural gas for delivery to Uzbekistan's largest cement factory, which was owned by the state at the time.
The investigation found that Ultimo Group, which was granted the state contract just over a month after it was founded, had multiple ties to a close confidant of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev's son-in-law, Otabek Umarov, who serves as his deputy security chief.
The sudden and lucrative emergence of Ultimo Group in the Uzbek gas sector was striking in part because the company was all but unknown to the public and did not have a functioning website.
But shortly after RFE/RL published its investigation, Ultimo Group added a corporate logo and content to its website, primarily stock photographs and several curt, backdated news items going back more than three years.
The date given for the earliest of these newly added news items -- March 11, 2021 -- actually predates the existence of the Ultimo Group website, whose domain was registered nearly a month later, online records show.
Most of the news items added to the website are no longer than a paragraph and closely mirror headlines and articles posted by the Uzbek news site Gazeta.uz.
The website's newly added claim that Ultimo Group "supplies natural gas to the Republic of Uzbekistan" and that its "business interests cover mainly the regions of Central Asia and South-East Asia" appears to contradict comments by company director Ravshan Mutalov one week before RFE/RL published its investigation.
"We haven't been operating for more than a year," Mutalov said by telephone when asked about the company he works for in the gas sector. Mutalov declined to name the company or provide further details.
RFE/RL could find no record of commercial activity by Ultimo Group after 2022.
RFE/RL's investigation also found that Ultimo Group received at least $66 million in wire transfers from Uzbek state gas-transit monopoly, Uztransgaz, under a gas contract whose details remain unclear.
While Mirziyoev has repeatedly made public calls to stamp out graft and cronyism, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International wrote in its most recent assessment of Uzbekistan that the gas-rich nation, Central Asia's most populous, "remains an authoritarian state characterized by high levels of corruption, nepotism, and abuse of power."
Mutalov is among several individuals and companies in a cross-border network linked to Ultimo Group and Umarov, including Umarov's close confidant, Uzbek Judo Federation head Azizjon Kamilov.
This network includes several companies in the United Arab Emirates that have operated under the name Ultimo Group and Rushmore. One of these U.A.E.-based Ultimo Group companies was managed by the British license holder of Umarov's personal sports-apparel brand, 7Saber.
A key figure in the U.A.E. - based part of this network is an Uzbek associate of Umarov and Kamilov named Doniyor Kadirov.
The new life for Ultimo's dormant website was not the only notable online change visible following RFE/RL's investigation.
After it was published, Kadirov temporarily locked his Instagram account. When it became visible to the public again, a photograph showing him together with Umarov and Kamilov had been removed.
Kadirov operates both the U.A.E.-based company Ultimo Group FZCO and several companies operating under the name Rushmore, which all use the same phone number. Following the RFE/RL investigation, that telephone number was removed from their websites.
On April 29, RFE/RL called the two listed contact telephone numbers on the refurbished website of the Tashkent-based Ultimo Group, which did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment.
Automated messages said the numbers were not in service.
RFE/RL's Baktygul Chynybaeva and Riin Aljas contributed to this report.
