Impact

Our goal of investing in Trilight was to help it to grow, attract foreign investors and partners and eventually invest in other businesses.

After investing, we started discussions with foreign companies and investors. We met many industry leading companies in Scandinavia. Companies we met included one of the largest bakeries in Sweden with over 50 years’ experience, the largest distributor of baked goods and owner of numerous factories in Northern Europe and the worlds leading manufacturer of baked good ‘enhancers’. We also met with many institutional investors in Europe. One of them is a large investment fund in Germany. Their minimum investment amount a that time was €5 million. Trilight was not ready for that kind of investment. But these were opportunities that we could work towards in future, one step at a time. The opportunities were there.

Unfortunately, problems started with Trilight. Discussions with foreign organisations was put on hold.  This means putting on hold opportunities that could attract industry leading companies to Kyrgyzstan, create jobs and export opportunities. This could have benefited Nurgazy Nurgaziev. As mentioned in the article ‘I need a Loan’, it started to become clear that Nurgazy’s main priority was to find ways to get more money from us.

Nurgazy is not the only one who could have benefited. The economy would have benefited, through jobs being created. If things went well, we planned to increase our investment in Trilight as well as invest in other companies. All this was put on hold.

The Government would have benefited as well. Kyrgyzstan is not perceived as an attractive investment destination. It is a challenge for Kyrgyz companies to attract foreign investors. Government is trying to attract foreign investors. There are frequent investment missions to many countries, lot of meetings with investors and business associations. But little result. This approach may not be very effective. Kyrgyzstan has many laws to protect investors but the laws are not being enforced. What would be convincing for investors are actual examples of investments being made, problems faced and solved in a good way. This would show that the system protects. Government making promises to protect investors is not convincing. Actual case examples are more convincing.

Long time ago, I lead a team to Palestine, to advise the securities markets. Our security advisors and the embassy advised us against travelling there. Israel had just announced withdrawal from its occupation of Palestine. It was an uncertain, and potentially dangerous, time. We went anyway. The stock exchange has one major problem. They were attracting far too much capital, both local and foreign. There was a risk of the marketing rising too much and crashing. Even though it was too risky to travel to Palestine, it does not stop investors. One main reason was success story. Investors made money and faced no problems. This attracted more investors. I cannot comment on Palestine’s rule of law and corruption at that time. What mattered was investors experiences. And this is what Kyrgyzstan needs. Through our investments, we would have done this. We already had a large network among foreign investors. We would have shared positive stories.

We are still fighting to resolve the issue. We will not stop. There are many people who realise the importance of doing things right. They helped in getting our investigation reopened each time it was closed. Couple of times, it was stated in writing that the reason for closing the case was unjustified. There is hope.