Lazareva, a Business Executive’s Inside Story

Diplomat
3 min readOct 8, 2019

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Ms Lazareva, a leading business executive, recognized for her role as chief executive and vice-chairman of the private equity group KGL Investment (KGLI), a business she has led ever since 2007.KGLI deal with The Port Fund, which empower in mid-sized, high-potential port management and logistics associated businesses, together with a combined business enterprise that makes the logistics hub Global Gateway Logistics City on a previous United Nation military base in The Philippines.

At a time of continuous media reports of Russian interference in US elections and a frigidity between Moscow and Washington, the unusual case of Marsha Lazareva — the Russian businesswoman jailed in Kuwait on misuse charges — is one of the few happening where the two superpowers have combined to attain a common goal of combat prejudice.

Marsha Lazareva, a United States educated, Russian-born businesswoman and her 5-year-old son, a US citizen, have been kept the prisoner in Kuwait for 470 days on uncertain charges.

The anonymity is: Why?

Marsha Lazareva, a high-flying member of the international business community, has filed a notice of intercontinental intercession with the State of Kuwait for violating a bilateral investment agreement in infringement of international law. The notice follows a series of invalid charges against Lazareva by the Kuwait Prosecutor General that has resulted in her protracted custody.

Lazareva, the CEO of KGL Investment in Kuwait, was under arrest in November 2017 on the blame of wasting public funds and stealing, sentenced to 10 years of hard labour and command to forfeit a $72 million fine. However, her confidence was fake — and later upturned. In fact, the sole witness presenting proof against her, a Kuwaiti government auditor, was then found responsible for creating the documents used to criticise her.

The notice states that accuse in opposition to Ms Lazareva, a business executive and a Russian citizen, are component of a coordinated campaign to harm her reputation as a flourishing businesswoman and reduce the worth of her investments.

In November 2017, Lazareva was arrested and apprehended for inquiring on the orders of the Kuwaiti General Prosecutor’s office. After being held in miserable circumstances for over two months, she was provisionally unconfined as part of a $33 million bail agreement, only to be jailed once more three months later.

As Vice Chairman and Managing Director of KGL Investment (KGLI), Marsha Lazareva was the only overseas female serving as the chief of investment business in Kuwait. In her competence at KGLI, Lazareva administers the foundation of an investment property called The Port Fund, whose investors integrated and the Kuwait Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS) and the Kuwait Ports Authority (KPA).

Over its ten-year investment period, The Port Fund develops its original investment of $188 million to $380 million. In 2017, it was in the procedure of distributing takings to its limited partners and creditors, with the KPA and PIFSS, when $496 million in funds were iced up in a Dubai bank. Those funds were lastly released in February 2019, after a prolonged and costly legal battle, at which time the Port Fund’s creditors, depositors, and stakeholders have remunerated the personal monies due them. However, following two subsequent investigations, a Kuwait court continues to reject Lazareva’s release.

According to Lazareva, a business executive legal team, her achievement in Kuwait created enemies. It was after the profitable sale of a real estate project in the Philippines to Udenna, a Davao City-based holding company that arrest for the inquiry finally move toward though Kuwaiti women are amongst the most uninhibited in the Middle East.Kuwait was positioned first between Arab countries in the Global Gender Gap statement for 2014 and 2015. However, the accusations made in opposition to Marsha Lazareva, as well as the observations allegedly made by the judge, put forward that sexism and prejudice may have played a role in her imprisonment.

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