Batyr Rakhimov

Rakhimov was born in 1966 in Kokand, in Uzbekistan's Ferghana Valley, the son of a policeman and a schoolteacher, and trained as a lawyer at Tashkent State University [4]. His business career began innocuously enough: trading imported cars at the tail end of the Soviet era, before expanding into aluminum and non-ferrous metals. The latter earning him the underworld nickname that would follow him for decades [1][43].

What transformed him from businessman to underworld figure was Moscow in the 1990s. According to regional crime reporting, Rakhimov was formally "crowned" a vor v zakone, a thief-in-law and member of the elite of the post-Soviet criminal world, in 1998, with the blessing of Aslan Usoyan, the Caucasus crime patriarch better known as "Grandpa Khasan." He then spent years as a trusted lieutenant of Vyacheslav "Yaponchik" Ivankov, one of the most notorious Russian mafia bosses ever to operate in the West [3][21][41].

It was through these channels, investigators say, that Rakhimov found his true calling: not violence, but the quiet laundering of criminal money.

In 2001, Rakhimov moved to Barcelona, where, according to a finding by Spanish National Court Judge Fernando Grande-Marlaska, he operated what amounted to a professional laundering service for Russian criminal clans, moving their proceeds through front companies and prime Spanish real estate [3][37].

In March 2010, Spanish authorities struck. Operación Java, as the case was codenamed, produced 79 arrests across Europe and dismantled an underworld financial network that, in the judge's words, implicated Rakhimov as "the fugitive leader of an Eastern European criminal organization" with tendrils in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The Spanish investigation even traced his operations into the microstate of Andorra, where his fixers, identified as Yury Zakharian and Gagik Eloyan, arranged passive-residency permits for figures with organized-crime backgrounds [37]. A Spanish conviction, if it had come, carried up to 17 years [3].

It never came. Rakhimov had been arrested earlier that month in Tashkent on suspicion of illegal business activity and tax evasion, part of the late President Islam Karimov's periodic purges of oligarchs. He posted bail, with figures reported between $100,000 and $1 million, and the charges evaporated [1][35][43]. Associates were jailed in Catalonia; Rakhimov walked free in Uzbekistan.

The Ukrainian police assessment of the episode would later prove telling. Rakhimov, they concluded, was a mobster for whom cooperation with the Uzbek special services saved him from prosecution: a gangster who had made himself useful to the state [1].

An opposition-era human-rights dossier raises darker allegations still. It names Rakhimov, alongside Salimbay Abduvaliev, as one of the two leaders of Uzbek organized crime, and identifies his close associate, Umid "Tigran Kaplanov" Aminov, as the financier of the 2012 assassination attempt on exiled imam Obidkhon Nazarov in Sweden, with $200,000 allegedly paid to the Lithuanian hitman Yuri Zhukovsky. The same cluster of names resurfaces around the 2007 murder of Kyrgyzstan-based journalist Alisher Saipov and the 2014 murder of imam Mirzagolib Khamidov [5].

None of these cases resulted in charges against Rakhimov. But the pattern, a circle of fixers around him repeatedly present at the scene of unsolved killings of dissidents and critics, is one that regional organized-crime analysts have found difficult to dismiss.

If the 2010s proved anything, it is that Rakhimov's survival instinct extends well beyond the criminal world and into the family of Uzbekistan's leadership itself.

In 2016, Rakhimov divorced his first family and remarried. His new wife: Diyora Usmanova, widow of Babur Usmanov, a nephew of Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, and herself a niece of the wife of Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who succeeded Islam Karimov as Uzbekistan's president that same year [4][28][30][33]. Regional reporting has suggested the divorce was done, strikingly, at Usmanov's request [31].

Overnight, one of Spain's most-wanted laundering suspects became family to the president of Uzbekistan. When Mirziyoyev's political consolidation gathered pace, Rakhimov quietly returned home around April 2021, politically rehabilitated [1][16][17].

But before Tashkent, there was Bodrum.

Rakhimov had relocated to Turkey in 2016, purchasing a luxury hotel on the Aegean coast after Karimov's death, and acquired Turkish citizenship in a process that, per regional organized-crime reporting facilitated by Nordic Monitor, may have involved a €10 million bribery arrangement tied to Erdoğan-linked fixer Cihangir Ekşioğlu [2][21][24].

The centerpiece scandal came in 2021. Victoria Yasemin Uras, a US-citizen heiress and daughter of the late Turkish hotelier Atilla Uras, went public with an extraordinary story. On the very day her father died, in June 2018, she said, Ekşioğlu had "stormed the resort with a tank," and Rakhimov's Russian-speaking driver had "purchased" the hotel via a $47 million check that subsequently bounced. Rakhimov, she alleged, then removed the hotel's corporate documents and valuables from the office safe. Uras filed complaints with both the FBI and Turkish courts [21][22][23].

Turkish media, dining out on the story's every operatic detail, branded him a "negative hero" and "Mirziyoyev's man" [22][23].

Which brings us back to that sunny afternoon in Paris: June 22, 2025.

Kakhramonjon Olimov, founder of Anorbank and once Rakhimov's trusted subordinate, was lured to a meeting by a woman calling herself "Anastasiya," taken in a minivan to a villa near Nice, tortured, subjected to a mock execution, and released only after signing a $5 million IOU [1][2].

The backstory is remarkably tangled. In 2017 and 2018, as Rakhimov's Karimov-era empire came under pressure, Olimov acquired the crown jewels: Kapitalbank (founded by Rakhimov in 2001), a major construction firm, and an insurer, all for roughly $13.5 million. That was a price Rakhimov later insisted represented about five percent of true value. His compensation demand: over $200 million [1][2][4].

Olimov told investigators his kidnapper was "M.," a trusted associate of Batyr Rakhimov, and Russian and French investigators have pointed to Rakhimov as the operation's mastermind [1] [2].

But there is a twist worthy of French noir, reported by The Insider in cooperation with L'Express: the kidnapping may have been staged by Olimov himself, a piece of political theater designed to paint his former business partner as the villain, claim victim status in France, and escape the debt. Olimov has since been placed on an international wanted list amid claims he ordered the abduction of Rakhimov, his former employer [2][27]. One participant has been arrested in France. As of this writing, the file remains open [1].

What is not in dispute is that the affair is politically radioactive for Tashkent, "extremely inconvenient," as regional reporting put it, for Rakhimov's relatives inside the Mirziyoyev family [1][7].

Pieced together, the record points to a career built less on what gangsters call muscle than on an unmatched instinct for the crucial moment: to move to Barcelona when the Russian underworld needed clean channels into Europe; to cooperate with Uzbek security services when arrest loomed in 2010; to remarry into the ruling family precisely as Uzbekistan's new leadership took power in 2016; to secure Turkish citizenship and an Aegean hotel as a fallback position; and to return home, fully rehabilitated, once the political winds shifted. Today, Batyr Rakhimov leads the Uzbekistan Tennis Federation [1][40]. In March 2018, when Ukraine detained him on an Interpol warrant and extradited him to Spain, extradition did not end his freedom. Charges again yielded to circumstance [3][41].

An Interpol fugitive. A Spanish judge's named money-laundering syndicate leader. A thief-in-law crowned by Grandpa Khasan. A man whose circle has been implicated in three unsolved murders of critics and dissidents. A hotelier accused by a US heiress of seizing a resort by bounced check. And now, a suspect in, or a victim of, a torture-kidnapping on the French Riviera.

At every junction, the question that haunts the file is the same: how does a man accrue this many allegations across this many jurisdictions, and live his life at tennis tournaments?

The answer, in Batyr Rakhimov's case, may simply be the oldest one in both the underworld and the palace: he made himself useful to the right people at the right time. And in Tashkent, that has always trumped everything.