Uznews.net – Switzerland-registered Zeromax GmbH, owned by the Uzbek president’s daughter Gulnara Karimova via straw men, has stopped its operations in Uzbekistan in line with a court ruling.

The ruling was issued by the Tashkent city economic court on 5 May, independent sources in Tashkent’s business circles said.

The ruling also ordered bailiffs to arrest the company’s properties and assets in Uzbekistan, as well as its stakes in other enterprises.

“Bailiffs have now been ordered to make inventories of the company’s properties and assets,” a source close to the company said.

The suit against Zeromax, which claimed to be Uzbekistan’s largest foreign investor whose business interests spanned from oil and gas and gold production to cotton and textile and to logistics, was brought because of its debts.

The source said that at the beginning of 2010 Zeromax had accumulated debts worth about $500m for supplies for the oil and gas sector.

The company’s

	Mirodil Mirjalalov was the company's executive director

representatives were not immediately available for comment. None of managers or directors turned up at its Tashkent office yesterday, while offices in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Switzerland did not pick up the phone. The source in Tashkent said that company staff in Tashkent had been ordered not to go to work.

This means Zeromax GmbH will not work in Uzbekistan any more, a new state-owned company has already been set up to replace it, another source said.

Zeromax, set up in Switzerland in 2001, positioned itself as a private foreign company that had achieved outstanding successes in the Uzbek economy thanks to its innovative, financial and market skills and potential.

The company concealed that President Islam Karimov’s daughter was behind it and tried to cover up the signs of this link, which opened all doors for the company in Uzbekistan, which has been ruled by Gulnara’s father.

Within a decade of its existence Zeromax set up about 10 joint and subsidiary companies in the country’s oil and gas sector. They were involved in designing and running projects in reconstructing and laying gas pipelines and building industrial facilities in the energy sector.

The Uzbekneftegaz national oil and gas company said Zeromax’s enterprises had conducted about 80% of construction projects in the oil and gas sector in Uzbekistan.

For instance, Zeromax was a contractor to build the Uzbek section of the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline and it owned the UzGazOil chain of petrol stations and assets in the textile, good, construction, mining and agricultural sectors.