NurGaz's Army? Kalkan and the Nurzhan Business Circle

Kalkan, the Nurzhan security company, employs about 4,800 licensed guards, about 1,900 of whom are licensed to carry arms. It guards the NurGaz oil fields, the Nurzhan refinery and the Northern Export Feeder, the branches of Chuy Commercial Bank, the stores of Jıldız Market, foreign companies' compounds and most of the large factories of the city. It provides the stewards at the NurGaz Stadium. Its overseas arm, Kalkan International, registered in Dubai in 2014, recruits Iradi men for security work in the Gulf.

Commentators close to the DPI call it “NurGaz's army”. The company calls itself “a licensed commercial service”. The Times has looked at who owns it and who it works for.

Who owns it

On paper the answer is simple. Kalkan was founded in 2009, when NurGaz spun off its security department, and its sole owner is its founder, Anatoly Grebenshchikov, 67, a former Soviet militia officer who became NurGaz's director of security in 1994 and organized the refinery workers who guarded its installations in 2007. NurGaz holds no shares.

Who it works for

The rest is less simple. NurGaz is Kalkan's largest client, and filings at the State Register show that most of its other large clients have directors or owners who sit with NurGaz executives on the boards of Nurzhan companies or in the city's business association. Of Kalkan's ten largest contracts that we could identify, eight are with companies in that circle around the NurGaz president, Kamran Bekzatov.

None of this is illegal. Kalkan's guns are licensed, and its guards have no police powers. But in a city whose politics are increasingly defined by its distance from Talas, the question of who could call on 1,900 armed men in an emergency is not idle. Mr. Grebenshchikov declined to be interviewed. NurGaz said it “has no control over any other company's employees”.