The widow of a Kazakhstan oligarch who lived in Malta has won a case against her own lawyer who failed to respect terms linked to the repayment of money he had appropriated without her knowledge.

Elnara Shorazova filed a case against her former lawyer, Pio Valletta, who was meant to repay some €900,000 he had withheld without her permission but had defaulted on some repayments.

She filed a case to ask the court to enforce a private agreement through which she would have forfeited €300,000 of the global amount if the lawyer paid her €600,000 within a stipulated time frame.

Mr Justice Robert Mangion heard how the two had signed a deed in 2012 to recoup the sum of €900,000 payable in instalments between July 2013 and July 2018.

According to this pact, Shorazova undertook to waive the remaining €300,000.

She also agreed to withdraw the report she had made to the police against the defendant for misappropriating the money as well as withdrawing the claim filed against him before the Commission for the Administration of Justice.

The parties had also agreed to withdraw the cases they had opened against each other.

Shorazova filed the fresh case alleging that Valletta was not punctual in the agreed payments, with the consequence that it necessitated triggering the clause regarding the waiver of the sum of €300,000 from the total sum of €900,000.

Valletta hit back, saying that his interpretation of the agreement was that if the repayments were not paid according to the stipulated dates, the amount of €300,000 was to be paid to him as payment for his professional services.

But Mr Justice Mangion rubbished this line of defence, saying that Valletta had not brought any evidence of professional fees due to him.

He noted that according to the agreement, “in the event that the defendant makes all the payments on account of the Settlement Sum as contemplated in clause 4.1 and 4.2 and punctually (meaning by not later than 5pm Malta time on each payment date), the claimant shall renounce to the remaining part of the Settlement Sum due in the sum of €300,000 and provide the defendant with a full and final receipt in respect of the Settlement Sum.”

Ms Justice Mangion observed that while Valletta admitted to being late in some of the payments, some of them with the permission of Shorazova, at no point was he ever asked to pay more than those stipulated repayments.

However, he noted that contrary to his claim, it was not true that he effected payments late after having obtained the consent of Shorazova but had been his “unilateral decision”.

Mr Justice Mangion, therefore, ordered Valletta to pay Shorazova the €300,000 she was due for non-observance of the repayment terms. 

The sum of €900,000 had been part of a larger sum of €2.4 million that had been intended to finance an Austrian-based company. Since the funds could not be deposited in his clients’ ‘shelf company’, the money had been temporarily held in a current account belonging to another company where he was director.

Valletta had eventually been charged with misappropriation of funds but had been acquitted in 2017 after Shorazova had failed to appear in court to testify, ostensibly as a result of the agreement to drop charges.

Austria trial

Rakhat Aliyev

Shorazova is the widow of Rakhat Aliyev, who had previously been married to the daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan from 1991 to 2019. 

Political tensions arose between him and his former father-in-law, leading to a warrant being issued for his arrest and he was forced to flee.

Aliyev married Shorazova in 2009 and they lived in Malta until 2013.

He died in prison in Austria in 2015, while awaiting trial on charges of kidnapping and murdering two Kazakh bankers, after having expressed fear that his life was in danger from Kazakhstan’s secret police.

Aliyev was posthumously found not guilty.