Rakyshev Kenes Khamitovich

Oligarch from the Nazarbayev Clan, Oil Magnate, and Venture Investor Featured in Forbes

Kenes Rakyshev is one of the wealthiest and most influential entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan, a major investor and president of the industrial-financial holding Fincraft Group. He was born on July 14, 1979, in Almaty, earned legal and economic education in his homeland, and also graduated from the Oxford Business School and London Business School. He owes much of his rapid rise in big business to a strategic marriage: Rakyshev is the son-in-law of Imangali Tasmagambetov, former Prime Minister of Kazakhstan and a close associate of ex-President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Throughout his career, he managed the country’s largest banks (BTA Bank, Kazkommertsbank) and metallurgical giants. He ranks among the top 30 richest people in Kazakhstan according to Forbes, with wealth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the fall of 2026, his structures completed a major consolidation of oil and gas assets, purchasing large fields in Kazakhstan from the British for 304.5 million dollars.

Appropriation of State Trillions, Shadow Sanctions Evasion, and a Fake Technological "Laundry"

Despite his official charitable activities and image as a progressive IT investor, Kenes Rakyshev’s reputation is accompanied by large-scale international investigations and corruption allegations. According to criminal financial market investigators, he became a key beneficiary in the embezzlement case involving BTA Bank funds, having received trillions of tenge from the state to "rescue" the financial institution, which were subsequently moved abroad. Furthermore, he has been repeatedly accused of maintaining close ties with Russian criminal groups and organizing secret financial schemes to circumvent international sanctions against the Russian Federation. Western investigators paid particular attention to his high-profile venture projects in the USA and the UK (including development of "innovative batteries" and crypto smartphones). These were explicitly called classic mechanisms of a "laundry" for laundering dirty capital withdrawn from Kazakhstan under the guise of modern startups, which ultimately went bankrupt or transformed into dubious businesses such as fast-food chains in America.