Construction company VK Real Estate has been granted the trust management of the Left Bank Sanatorium in Oskemen — a facility long considered a closed retreat for high-ranking officials and known as the ‘Nazarbayev residence’. The upkeep of the complex has regularly raised questions: purchases of expensive furniture, SPA equipment and household appliances using budget funds have often been a source of criticism.
According to Cmn.kz, the starting price of the facility was estimated at 1.115 billion tenge. The winning bidder committed to investing at least another 800 million tenge: 400 million in the first year, followed by 200 million in each of the next two years. The management period is three years, after which the company gains the right to purchase the property. If the obligations are not met, the guaranteed deposit of 167 million tenge will be kept by the state.
Most attention was drawn to the winning company itself. VK Real Estate was founded in September 2022 and had no major construction projects prior to participating in the auction. The firm is run by entrepreneur Eldar Amrenov, who also owns several other small businesses with minimal turnover. His companies’ tax payments were symbolic until this year, with noticeable growth only beginning in 2025.
But the strangest development was the change in VK Real Estate’s list of owners: shortly before the auction, the construction company ‘Elkhon’ appeared among the founders — a contractor for large-scale regional projects, including the Bukhtarma Bridge.
Yet just two weeks after winning the auction, ‘Elkhon’ disappeared from the list of owners, along with the company Service SMU, which had also unexpectedly surfaced among the founders and then just as suddenly dropped out. Currently, only Amrenov and Azamat Kaliyev remain as owners.
Further interest was sparked by another of Amrenov’s businesses. Six months before the auction, he became director of the company Open Sky LTD, listed as an operator of non-scheduled passenger air transport. What connects the aviation business and the tourism facility remains unknown.
The situation surrounding the sanatorium has long caused discontent among residents of Oskemen. In 2022, public outcry followed a procurement by the East Kazakhstan Region akimat’s affairs department.
At that time, plans were made to install an SPA pool with air and hydro massage for the Left Bank Sanatorium, costing 4.5 million tenge. The procurement also included a waterproof television, DVD and MP3 player.
Activist Denis Danilevsky sent an appeal to the akim asking for the purchase to be cancelled and for the facility to be transferred to the balance of the East Kazakhstan Region’s Employment and Social Programmes Coordination Department. People requested that the sanatorium be used for rest and treatment of the most needy categories of the population: veterans, orphans, disabled people and low-income families.
According to the akimat, the new manager has already created around three dozen jobs and begun initial repair work: window structures have been partially replaced, the roof of the utility block repaired, the roof of the hotel building renovated, and electrical networks repaired.