The following year brought bloody revolution, nationalization and accusations of mass embezzlement and worse aimed by the new regime at the fugitive Bakiyevs and their associates.
These years were the most productive during independence for the factory, which began producing polycrystalline silicon in line with world standards.īut at 750 kilograms in 2009, annual output was well short of the 165-200 tons that the new investors were setting as their ultimate target.
The shifting of responsibility for the chemicals has been a pattern at the plant, which has mostly stood idle after being prepped for privatization in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s.Īccording to a 2012 report by news website 24.kg assets on the territory were from 2007 onwards controlled by Belize-registered companies linked to then-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s son Maksim Bakiyev and his business partner and former classmate Alexey Eliseev. Everyone knows that we won’t get any investors here until the issue is resolved,” said Oskonbayev.Ĭomputer Power Center LLC is Chinese-owned, Oskonbayev said, without providing details. We raised these questions right after we bought the plant.
“Everybody knows that there is poison in these tankers, residue in the pipes. Its director, Maksat Oskonbayev, confirmed that it now hosts a crypto mining farm, although he claimed that the rigs aren’t currently running.ĭuring a meeting in Tash-Kumyr, Oskonbayev claimed that he is not allowed to access the territory and that the large vats of chemicals are not the company’s responsibility since they are owned by a separate firm called Tash-Kömür Silicon Production CJSC (TSP), from whom Computer Power Center LLC acquired the land and building three years ago. The site is now owned by Computer Power Center LLC, a company registered in Kyrgyzstan 2019. Over the years he saw the site constantly divided into different sections with different companies in charge as Kyrgyzstan’s political tides shifted, with two presidents felled within five years of each other during the second decade of independence. Kalmurzayev began working at Kristall as a foreman in 1985 and later became a production manager. Instead, neglected and ignored by the government, residents fear these corrosive chemicals are now slowly leaking out into the local environment, spelling ecological catastrophe for both the city and the wider region, including the populous Fergana Valley below. In the age of microchips and solar panels, its output would have been in high demand. Kalmurzayev died last year after a brief illness, leaving behind a trove of documents and press cuttings connected to the Soviet-legacy Kristall polysilicon factory where he was the last employee.īut the time bomb he referred to with regularity is still ticking.įor more than two decades, 80 tons of dangerous chemicals have sat in disused Kristall, which once transformed volatile compounds into materials for semiconductors and was slated to become one of the biggest plants in the world of its type. He tried until the end to find out where all the money went.” “He would say that Tash-Kumyr was sitting on an ecological time bomb. “I used to say to him: ‘What’s it to you? Leave that factory well alone’,” Kalmurzayev’s widow Uububyu Kalmurzayeva told Eurasianet during an interview at her home. The site is now owned by Computer Power Center LLC, a crypto-mining company registered in Kyrgyzstan 2019.įor more than two decades, 80 tons of dangerous chemicals have sat in disused Kristall.Įven after he retired in 2019, chemical engineer Suidumbek Kalmurzayev remained preoccupied by the fate of his former workplace in Tash-Kumyr, a Kyrgyz city that sits at the gateway to Central Asia’s Fergana Valley and is known locally as “the graveyard of factories.”
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