For the best part of the past decade banks from Kazakhstan have been held up as paragons of virtue: universally seen as much better managed than their Russian counterparts – if that’s not to damn them with faint praise. So it’s ironic that they should now suddenly be viewed as risky credits in the context of a threatened global credit squeeze – if not a quite a crunch – in the wake of the fallout from the sub-prime fiasco in the US.
Ironic, but not wholly unjustified....
