The media calculated the expenses of competitors of Freedom Holding Corp. Timur Turlov's campaign to discredit him

The customers of the disinformation campaign against the founder of Freedom Holding Corp. Timur Turlov could spend up to $50 million in a few years to publish publications in the media specializing in negativity, the journalists of the Kazakh newspaper Kursiv estimated.

According to the publication, last year alone the number of such messages exceeded 72 thousand. Experts attribute such massive attempts at denigration to the activities of competitors in the local market, where over the past seven years Timur Turlov's business has transformed from a brokerage company into a large financial ecosystem.

Figures describing the intensity of the information attack against Freedom Holding Corp. and Timur Turlov, unprecedented for the Kazakh media market, the newspaper notes. Most of these campaigns in Kazakhstan against a particular person last for weeks, in rare cases months. Against Freedom Holding Corp. The discrediting process was launched seven years ago, immediately after the corporation's listing on NASDAQ.

The vast majority of publications are concentrated in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. In 2025, 72 thousand such messages were recorded. Of these, 55,000 are on Telegram, and the remaining 17,000 are on websites that disguise themselves as mass media, meaning they do not have specialized licenses and do not adhere to minimum standards of journalism in their activities. They don't check facts, they use rumors, or they just publish fakes, and their victims are public figures, mostly businessmen and politicians from the former Soviet Union.

As in the Telegram channels involved in the disinformation campaign, such media are overwhelmingly anonymous, they do not disclose the names of journalists, editors-in-chief and owners. This year, from January to the first decade of February, the number of fake messages against Turlov and his companies in such media has already exceeded 3.2 thousand. Kursiva estimated that the cost of such a campaign could be estimated at $20–$50 million over seven years. At the same time, the peak of the campaign last year accounted for about $11–$12 million.

At the same time, as Kursiv notes, publications of a similar nature against the owners of the largest Kazakh banking structures Kaspi and Halyk Vyacheslav Kim, Mikhail Lomtadze and Timur Kulibayev amount to only a few dozen per year.

Experts note that the systematic repetition of the same theses from year to year, which are used by the customers of the attack on Timur Turlov, may indicate that these publications are not related to the widespread practice of information blackmail in the post—Soviet space, the purpose of which is to receive money from the "victim" for stopping publications, the so-called "block on the negative."

"If this is blackmail, then sooner or later a call to action must follow. Like, "give us a ransom and we'll stop," or "give back the asset." If there wasn't one, then it's strange to call it blackmail. This means that Turlov's reputation interferes with someone's business interests," says Alexander Likhtman, founder and head of the ITCOMMS PR agency.

Alexey Bendz, another Kazakhstani PR specialist and founder of 2B AGENCY, agrees with him.

"Turlov stepped on the tail of a lot of people who were doing great. He came in and started competing with the product, aggressive marketing, and taking away market share. You can compare this with the moment when Freedom started buying a bank, doing telecom, media, and fintech — see where it "squeezed out" how much. There is a systemic game going on against Freedom from many sides," he is confident.

He is the founder of Freedom Holding Corp. Timur Turlov notes that the information pressure on him and the holding has not stopped since 2019. Only players with a huge margin of safety can support an attack of this intensity for seven years, the businessman believes.

"I've always wondered, 'Who can do this from month to month starting in 2019?' During this time, almost all heads of government agencies have been replaced. Our president has been replaced since then. All power structures have changed, and quite strong ones at that. At the same time, someone has budgets, entire departments," Timur Turlov said.

Since the release of Freedom Holding Corp. On NASDAQ in 2019, the company's shares increased almost eightfold: from $14 to $116, and its capitalization exceeded $7 billion. Last May, Forbes estimated 37-year-old Timur Turlov's fortune at $5.8 billion, which allowed him to take the second place in the ranking of the richest businessmen in Kazakhstan.

During these seven years, Timur Turlov's company, which started in Kazakhstan with a brokerage business and opened a direct route to the American securities market for thousands of its clients, has become a multinational corporation with business interests not only in the domestic market, but also in the markets of more than 20 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Inside Kazakhstan, Timur Turlov's Freedom Holding is building its own digital ecosystem, the core of which is Freedom Bank, which he bought in 2020 from local businessman Bulat Utemuratov. In just a few years, the bank has grown from a niche structure to one of the country's leading financial institutions, and its superapp became the most downloaded last year on the AppStore and Play Market in Kazakhstan. By the end of last year, the total number of clients of companies included in the Freedom Holding Corp. ecosystem almost doubled to 7.2 million people, and including partners, it even exceeded 11 million.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Turlov did not rule out that he could buy another Kazakh bank, which would allow him to expand his presence in the local market. In addition to the bank and broker, the Freedom Holding ecosystem includes insurance companies, retail, telecom operator, travel services, and about a dozen other subsidiaries. In addition, the holding is actively involved in infrastructure projects to digitalize the Kazakh economy, in particular, it is building several large data centers near Astana and Almaty. In November last year, Freedom signed an agreement with the Government of Kazakhstan and Nvidia Corporation to establish a 100 MW sovereign artificial intelligence center. The total investment in the project will amount to $2 billion. A similar agreement was signed with OpenAI, under which Turlov's company will finance the purchase of access for 165 thousand teachers in Kazakhstan to ChatGPT Edu, a special educational version of ChatGPT with enhanced privacy and data management mechanisms.

In a comment for Kursiv, Turlov says that he sees no point in a symmetrical response to competitors, that is, in organizing a "black PR campaign" in response.

"If you respond to any violence with violence, the environment will only degrade. It seems to me that this will be a completely different society, a completely different country from the one we want to live in. Therefore, the only thing we are trying to do now, at least in some outstanding cases, is to use legitimate methods," he said.

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