Kazakhstan splurges to get Astana light rail back on track

Kazakhstan’s government has allocated over $100 million this year to build a scandal-ridden transport system in the capital that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has slammed as reeking of corruption.

Fifty billion tenge ($112 million) has been approved for construction of the light rail transit (LRT) system in Astana, Marat Karabayev, the minister in charge of infrastructure, said on February 28, Eurasianet reports.

“The construction of the LRT will be completed,” he insisted, seeking to dispel doubts that the troubled project – which was designed to link the airport and the main railway station and ease the burden on Astana’s traffic-choked roads – will stall again.

It is years behind schedule: The government initially intended to have it completed by 2017.

However, Astana had problems raising the finance. Building only started in 2017, with a soft loan from the China Development Bank for most of the $1.9 billion cost of construction, to be carried out by Chinese contractors.

By then the project was scaled back: 11 stations instead of 18, waits of 10 minutes between trains instead of three.

A deadline to complete the first stage was missed in December 2018, and the next year the LRT ran into big trouble.

First, construction stopped after the China Development Bank froze the credit line over concerns that $258 million of the $313 million it had lent Astana LRT, the state-owned company executing the project, had been put in a bank that subsequently collapsed. The company later had to repay that loan, raising the financing by issuing bonds.

Then in 2019, amid a corruption scandal, construction was put on indefinite hold.

Investigators said that officials and Astana LRT executives had inflated contracts and embezzled the difference, which a court later heard ran to 5.8 billion tenge ($13 million at current exchange rates).

In 2021 seven people were jailed for up to 10 years over the scam, while two others, including a former deputy mayor of Astana, remained on the run.

But a higher court later overturned the guilty verdicts, and sent the case for further investigation. New court proceedings began last summer and have dragged on since.

Meanwhile, instead of the glitzy sky train shown on the designs, Astana’s cityscape is blighted by ugly concrete columns looming up into nothingness.

Then last year, Tokayev reluctantly ordered the completion of a project that he acknowledged was flawed.

“The project was mistaken from the outset. That must be admitted. And it is a project with a strong whiff of corruption,” Tokayev said.

Indeed, the president had pointed out in 2019 that the projected daily passenger flow, at 146,000 people, would mean a seventyfold increase from the numbers then traveling on the route, which was “incomprehensible.” Tokayev was likely referring to the number of passengers taking public transport from the airport to the station, although people taking shorter trips could also use the LRT.  

But last year Tokayev said that abandoning the LRT would cost Kazakhstan “time and money,” so “we have no choice” other than to finish construction.

What happened to his plan to bring in new architects and urban planners to examine options has not been revealed. But officials have said that the same Chinese consortium is building the LRT, previously reported as consisting of the China Railway International Group and the Beijing State-Owned Assets Management Co. The trains will follow the old route that Tokayev had said seemed unviable.

The government has now set aside nearly $160 million to complete construction: this year’s 50 billion tenge, plus 20 billion ($45 million) last year.

That falls far short of the $577 million officials calculate is needed to complete the troubled LRT – and they have not explained how that squares with the original estimated cost of more than triple that.

But the government is still making big promises: The sky train will finally open by the end of next year, it says.