Sanctions have removed the Russian who ran the game. His heir apparent is a Kazakh financier — and Astana could not have scripted it better
On the afternoon of 26 September, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, delegates from some 200 national chess federations will do something they have not done in eight years: elect a new president of FIDE, the sport’s governing body. Until high summer, the exercise looked like a coronation. Arkady Dvorkovich, a former deputy prime minister of Russia who has run world chess since 2018, was standing for a third term. Then, in late July, the EU added him to a sanctions list over the war in Ukraine. He called the decision unlawful, promised to fight it, and suspended his own powers rather than let them paralyse the federation. Viswanathan Anand, the great Indian world champion serving as his deputy, took interim charge. Within days Dvorkovich had withdrawn from the race altogether.
Three tickets were lodged by the nomination deadline. Two come from German entrepreneurs: Jan Henric Buettner, the man behind the Freestyle Chess series he co-founded with Magnus Carlsen, running with the English organiser Malcolm Pein; and Wadim Rosenstein, founder of WR Chess, running with Gordon Tang. The third is Timur Turlov, a 38-year-old Kazakh billionaire, with Anand as his deputy.
Turlov is the obvious favourite, and the reasons are worth stating plainly. He was Dvorkovich’s chosen running mate before the sanctions landed, so he inherits the outgoing administration’s machinery intact. He has the interim president on his ticket. And Freedom Holding, the Nasdaq-listed financial group he founded and runs, is FIDE’s principal sponsor, which means the man asking the federations for their votes is also the man paying for a good deal of what they are voting about.
None of this is against the rules. All of it should give pause.
Chess has never been merely a game played by clever people in quiet rooms. It has always been a theatre of state prestige, from Soviet dominance of the world championship to the Fischer–Spassky match of 1972, which no one at the time mistook for a sporting contest. International federations confer something governments find hard to buy: legitimacy, a diplomatic address book, a seat at tables that are otherwise closed. Kazakhstan, a country working hard to be seen as the reasonable centre of Central Asia, a rising power in the Turkic world and a bridge between East and West, would find a friendly figure at the head of FIDE useful. A number of analysts believe Turlov’s victory would suit Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the Kazakh president, rather well.
Turlov was born in Moscow. He moved his family to Kazakhstan in 2011, though his principal business interests remained Russian for another decade. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine he took Kazakh citizenship, said he had renounced his Russian passport, and in the autumn of 2022 announced that he was selling his Russian assets and reorienting Freedom Holding towards Kazakhstan. Forbes now puts his fortune at $6.4 billion; the holding company is valued at more than $9 billion.
In Kazakhstan, the growth has been remarkable. Freedom Bank, launched in 2020, was writing more than half of country’s mortgages by September 2022, and by several estimates rather more than that today. The group has since expanded into telecommunications, insurance, media and consumer electronics, and abroad into Europe, the United States, Britain, Turkey and the Emirates. Inside Kazakhstan’s business community this speed has fuelled a persistent suspicion that Turlov has enjoyed political help at the highest level. The claim is disputed. What is not disputed is the access.
In 2023, Tokayev personally asked Turlov to lead the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, an appointment that raised eyebrows, since Turlov had neither played professionally nor administered the game before. He was received at Akorda, the presidential residence, shortly afterwards. He appeared at Tokayev’s set-piece meeting with business leaders in February 2025, briefed the president in Shymkent on Freedom Telecom’s digital projects two months later, and travelled to Pakistan in Tokayev’s delegation in May 2026. In March he was awarded the Order of Parasat, among Kazakhstan’s highest honours. Whatever else he is, he is no longer only a businessman.
The controversies mostly concern Russia. Turlov has himself described Kazakhstan as becoming “a Switzerland for Russians,” meaning the influx of capital and entrepreneurs. His critics give the phrase a colder reading: that Kazakhstan has become the corridor through which wealthy Russians move money, reach Western financial products and blunt the effect of sanctions.
In 2023 Hindenburg Research, an American short-selling firm, alleged that Freedom Holding had booked revenue questionably, mishandled client funds and helped rich Russians move assets out of sanctioned banks – including Alfa-Bank, VTB and Tinkoff – while continuing to operate in Russia through nominally independent structures. Freedom Holding rejected the substance of the allegations and commissioned an outside review; critics said the review settled nothing.
A European NGO report in 2024 made similar accusations against Freedom Finance and urged Brussels and Washington to impose sanctions on both the company and Turlov personally. Neither has done so. Ukraine, however, sanctioned him in the autumn of 2022, and he has so far failed to have the measures lifted in court. According to several reports, intermediaries linked to Tokayev went to Kyiv to argue his case. Turlov says he condemns Russia’s aggression and that his companies have given substantial charitable support to Ukraine.
Turlov has also faced continuing legal scrutiny over his previous activities in Russia. One case concerns the alleged misappropriation of more than 3.8 billion roubles (€40 million) from Association Bank and the transfer of the funds to Cyprus-based offshore companies said to be linked to him. The missing funds were reportedly identified in 2019, while Turlov was still conducting business in Russia. Proceedings began only after his move to Kazakhstan. Turlov denies any connection to the case.
Nor is the trouble confined abroad. In 2025 Freedom Finance was engulfed in a scandal in Kazakhstan over allegations that client money went not into brokerage accounts but directly to senior staff, who spent it. More than 30 investors were reportedly recognised as victims, with combined losses said to run to tens of millions of dollars; one of them later took his own life. Criminal proceedings were opened against two Freedom Finance managers. The interior ministry has separately been examining structures linked to Turlov over the allegedly unlawful issuance of Kazakh tax numbers to Russian citizens – the same mechanism at the centre of a wider scandal. In January, Tokayev told a meeting on financial crime that some $14 billion had moved through one of the country’s banks to third countries, calling it an outrageous fact from the point of view of law, economics and politics. The institution was not publicly identified. Some commentators suggested Freedom Bank could have been involved, given its work with Russian clients. The bank has denied any involvement. Turlov himself has been convicted of nothing.
Which leaves the question the federations will answer in Samarkand. Is Turlov’s resilience the product of political protection, or simply of money and reach on a scale that makes trouble bounce off? The honest answer is that it hardly matters to the outcome. He arrives with the incumbent’s apparatus, the interim president’s name, and the chequebook the sport depends on.
There is an irony here that ought to trouble anyone who cares about chess. FIDE has spent the summer extracting itself from a Russian president made untenable by sanctions. It may be about to elect a Moscow-born financier who is himself under Ukrainian sanctions, and whose company’s exposure to Russian clients has been the subject of years of allegation. Kazakhstan would gain a genuine instrument of soft power. Whether world chess would gain anything is a different question, and one the delegates have seven weeks to ask.
