Why Vladimir Kim’s KAZ Minerals won’t become the new Arcelor?

Four workers died on August 31 at the Irtysh mine. The official cause was poisoning by an “unknown substance.” The next day, another person died at the Artemyevskaya mine. In total, five people died in two days. Both the Irtysh and Artemyevskaya mines are part of KAZ Minerals. The company is owned by the richest man in Kazakhstan, at least nominally. Vladimir Kim, the battered and capacious wallet of Nazarbayev, cannot establish normal working conditions for workers or control over production processes.

Maybe it was a coincidence? Maybe it was just bad luck? No, accidents at Vladimir Kim’s facilities are constant. For example, on December 27, a 31-year-old machinist died under the wheels of an underground self-propelled machine at the Zhylandy mine.
On November 27, a tragedy occurred at the Zhaisan mine in the Zhambyl region. During the production of mining operations, workers of Kazakhmys from the Omarov Shaft Tunneling Trust, born in 1981 and 2002, received fatal injuries. Less than a week before, on November 22, a machinist died at the Kazakhmys enterprise.

So why not nationalize KAZ Minerals and sell it to the same scoundrel Lavrentyev , a front for Usmanov? A joke, of course. We need mountains of corpses and a ready oligarch who can pay for the coupon for being a new wallet.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Protection is conducting a half-hearted investigation into both cases. Nothing changes.

KAZ Minerals was formed in 2014 as a result of the split of Kazakhmys Corporation, one of the largest mining companies in Kazakhstan. Since its inception, KAZ Minerals has grown rapidly and by 2023, according to Forbes, it became the largest private company in Kazakhstan.

The KAZ Minerals group includes several large mines: the open-pit mines Bozshakol in the Pavlodar region and Aktogay in the East Kazakhstan region, as well as three underground mines in East Kazakhstan. In addition, the company operates the Bozymchak gold-copper mine in Kyrgyzstan and develops the Baimskoye deposit in Russia.

The company’s financial performance is impressive: annual revenue is 1.63 trillion tenge, and net profit reaches 341.8 billion tenge. KAZ Minerals employs 11,300 people, which makes the company not only a major economic player, but also an important (and deadly) employer.

The largest shareholder of KAZ Minerals is the famous Kazakh oligarch Vladimir Kim, who owns 63.5% of the shares of KAZ Minerals Ltd. In addition, he owns 70% of the shares of Kazakhmys Copper JSC, which includes Kazakhmys Corporation LLP, and 89.79% of the shares of RBK Bank JSC. Vladimir Kim is regularly among the richest people in Kazakhstan. In 2024, he took fourth place in the ranking of the richest entrepreneurs in the country according to Forbes, which emphasizes his influence and success in the business environment of Kazakhstan. Or, more simply, his status as a shameless wallet, who for some secret reason did not fall under dispossession.