Kazakhstan's finance ministry is investigating the country's two biggest commercial banks for possible tax violations, the banks said on Monday but they denied media reports that they faced big bills.
"There are no figures yet (for a possible charge)," Daulet Sembayev, Kazkommertsbank's deputy chairman, told Reuters. He said he expected the inspection, the first for several years, to be over by the end of this month.
Opposition newspaper the Assandi Times reported a week ago that Kazkommertsbank, the country's biggest commercial lender, faced a charge of $30 million for unpaid taxes, equivalent to half its net profit last year.
Number two bank TuranAlem faced a $15 million bill, it said.
TuranAlem confirmed a tax inspection was underway but denied it had been told to pay a sum of money.
Sudden tax inspections and bills are frequently used throughout the former Soviet Union as a method of putting semi-official pressure on companies. Some commentators have seen political overtones in the bank tax inspections ahead of parliamentary elections in September that will test the authorities' claims that they are making progress on democracy.
A presidential adviser last month accused the head of Kazkommertsbank, Nurzhan Subkhanberdin, of financing opposition political party Ak Zhol (Bright Path), which Subkhanberdin denied.
The adviser, Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, also accused him of being "a Kazakh Khodorkovsky" - a reference to Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky who is on trial in Moscow in a $1 billion fraud case after dabbling in Russian politics.
Subkhanberdin was briefly a member of the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) opposition group in 2001, out of which the more moderate Ak Zhol later broke away.
Ak Zhol and DCK are seen as a challenge to President Nursultan Nazarbayev's unbroken 15-year rule of the Central Asian state.
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