For years, the Bars resort, perched in the foothills above Kyrgyzstan’s iconic Issyk-Kul lake, attracted local and foreign visitors with its picturesque views and athletic facilities.
Few of them would have known that the resort, named after the mountainous Central Asian nation’s famous snow leopards, belonged to the family of the country’s most notorious criminal boss.
Kamchi Kolbayev, the alleged head of a network involved in drug, arms, and human trafficking, extortion, and other crimes, was killed in a special operation by the Kyrgyz state security service (GKNB) in 2023. The agency subsequently released a video listing his seized assets, including the Bars complex.
In public remarks last month, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov said his government had sold off the resort for $12 million, or double its value, to a local businessman. “That money went to the state budget,” Japarov said.
But an investigation by OCCRP has found that the government received no such windfall — the GKNB had originally valued the resort at $20 million — and that its actual buyer in 2025 was an obscure NGO with no website or public activity called Edinstvo Naroda (“Unity of the People”).
The GKNB’s valuation of the Bars resort appears both in the 2023 video the security agency released about Kolbayev’s assets and in Kyrgyz Supreme Court records concerning their seizure.
At the time of Edinstvo Naroda’s purchase of the resort, the organization’s listed founder was Salamat Chynybekov, who also paid about $13 million into it, according to its financial disclosures to Kyrgyz tax authorities. Chynybekov, who is now a local municipal official, did not respond to reporters’ questions about the source of these funds.
Edinstvo Naroda’s disclosures show that it also received at least $1.7 million from Evrazia (“Eurasia”), a Russian organization sanctioned by the United States and the European Union, and from its Kyrgyz subsidiary, Evrazia KG.
Evrazia organizes exchange programs, competitions, and other initiatives across the former Soviet countries, promoting the vision of a Moscow-led Eurasian civilization that stands in opposition to the West. As previously reported by OCCRP and Moldovan partners, the organization was involved in funneling large sums of money to Moldova in an attempt to secure a “no” vote on the country’s 2024 referendum on joining the European Union.
A number of governments describe Evrazia as a vehicle for Ilan Shor, a fugitive Moldovan oligarch who was sentenced at home to 15 years in prison for fraud and money laundering, and accuse him of orchestrating shadowy Kremlin-linked financial networks.
This is not the first time Shor’s name has come up in relation to Kyrgyzstan. A payment network called A7 that he co-founded with a Russian state bank routes funds through Kyrgyzstan on the way to their final destinations, according to several media reports based on leaked data. He and Evrazia did not respond to requests for comment.
Japarov’s press office, the GKNB, and other Kyrgyz officials also did not respond to reporters’ questions about the valuation discrepancy of the Bars resort or its ultimate buyer. The resort closed its doors in 2023 and remains closed to the public today.
The Man Behind Edinstvo Naroda
At the time Edinstvo Naroda acquired the resort, its listed founder was Salamat Chynybekov, now the head of a city department in the regional capital of Karakol.
According to Edinstvo Naroda’s financial disclosure, Chynybekov paid about $13 million into the organization in 2025, slightly more than the $12 million it paid the government for the Bars resort.
The origin of these funds is unclear. Photos posted on social media show that Chynybekov worked at a Karakol cafe and at Kyrgyzstan’s famous Kumtor gold mine in the mid-2010s.
In 2020, he became the owner of a company called Asia Tau. Reporters were unable to find any public presence for the firm, but trade declarations show that it imported Chinese circuit board parts into Kyrgyzstan in 2022. The company’s official corporate record lists it as a tourism agency.
Reporters also found a link between the company and Evrazia KG, the Kyrgyz subsidiary of the Russian influence group: A woman named Kymbat Urumkulova, who was once the director of Asia Tau’s former parent company, is Evrazia KG’s director. She did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2025, Chynybekov briefly sat on the board of Capital Bank, a state-owned bank sanctioned by the EU and UK for allegedly helping Russia pay for its war against Ukraine.
His boss in the city of Karakol is the city’s mayor, Talantbek Imanov. Before his appointment to this position in March, Imanov served as Kyrgyzstan’s digital development minister, headed the country’s presidential investment agency, and was President Japarov’s representative for “special assignments.”
SPARK, a commercial corporate database, lists Imanov as a previous co-owner of Asia Tau along with Chynybekov, though it does not provide the dates of his ownership. The two men are also co-founders of an NGO called Volontyory Strany (“Volunteers of the Country”) which was set up during the COVID-19 pandemic but has no activity reporters could find.
Imanov and Chynybekov did not respond to requests for comment.
Reporters found no documentary evidence showing Aleksei Shirshov, the man President Japarov publicly identified as the buyer of the Bars resort, as the owner of the facility.
Though Japarov praised what he described as Shirshov’s work on the resort in his October 24 remarks, saying that he has “built a golf course and is installing funiculars,” reporters found no connection between him and the resort’s actual new owner, the NGO Edinstvo Naroda.
Shirshov was widely reported to have been close to a son of deposed former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who controlled a powerful economic agency, was later accused of embezzling millions in public funds, and now lives in exile.
In a written response to OCCRP, Shirshov did not explicitly address Japarov’s statement about him acquiring and improving the resort. He wrote that he holds no public office and has no legal obligation to disclose information about his private business activities. He declined to comment substantively on OCCRP’s questions about the Bars resort and its ownership.
Shirshov said that he has assisted projects aimed at developing Kyrgyzstan’s economy for years with “professional experience, business contacts and investment opportunities.”
“My participation in such projects involves providing assistance. I am not a member of the governing bodies of the relevant organizations, I do not exercise operational management of their activities, and I do not make decisions on their business transactions,” he wrote.
Funded From Moscow
According to an unsigned investment agreement from February 2025, the Kyrgyz government initially planned to lease the Bars resort to Evrazia KG, the Kyrgyz subsidiary of the Russian influence organization Evrazia, for $12.1 million.
In line with its parent organization’s mission, Evrazia KG operates media schools, conducts training sessions, and hosts art exhibits and concerts by Russian performers in Kyrgyzstan. These activities advance pro-Moscow narratives and, according to the organization’s financial disclosures to tax authorities, are backed by millions of dollars from its Russian parent.
However, Evrazia KG never got the Bars resort. Instead, two months later, the government approved a new agreement on almost the same terms, this time as a sale to Edinstvo Naroda. Land records and data from the finance ministry’s Open Budget portal confirm the sale.
Documents reviewed by reporters show that Edinstvo Naroda is tied to Evrazia and Evrazia KG through financial transactions.
Disclosures filed with the tax authorities show that it received about $1.7 million from the two organizations in 2025. A leak of Evrazia KG records from the same year also shows that it paid salaries for Edinstvo Naroda staff out of its budget.
Also in 2025, Edinstvo Naroda provided what financial disclosures described as “humanitarian and technical assistance” valued at nearly $8 million to Evrazia KG. The document provides no further detail about the nature of this assistance.
Evrazia KG did not respond to a request for comment on these relationships. Reporters were unable to locate public-facing contacts for Edinstvo Naroda, and Chynybekov did not respond to written requests for comment.
Source: OCCRP · 2026-11-11