Tashkent Launches International Financial Centre Bid

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — Uzbekistan has declared the creation of the Tashkent International Financial Centre (TIFC) its number one state policy priority. The announcement was made by the country's president at the plenary session of the fifth Tashkent International Investment Forum, immediately setting the tone for a panel discussion involving the heads of leading global financial institutions, investors, and legal advisers.

Nodir Jurayev, head of a department at the Administration of the President of Uzbekistan, outlined the architecture of the project. He said the TIFC is conceived not as another tax-incentive zone or new institutional label, but as a fully-fledged financial and legal infrastructure — an institutional bridge between global investors, financial institutions, asset managers, and professional firms on one side, and a rapidly transforming economy with substantial demand for capital, technology, and infrastructure on the other.

The centre is to fulfil four functions simultaneously: improving the country's investment attractiveness; creating capital markets that do not yet exist; forming a predictable and competitive environment for international financial business; and strengthening Uzbekistan's role as a regional hub for trade, investment, and financial services.

The legal foundation of the centre will rest on three elements: an independent competent regulator within the TIFC; a legal system based on English common law, familiar to international financial institutions; and a separate Tashkent International Commercial Court for dispute resolution.

The draft law has already been prepared with the active participation of international experts and organisations and is under consideration in parliament. Jurayev emphasised that the drafters had deliberately avoided a top-down approach, consulting dozens of international financial institutions during the drafting process to understand what rules investors want to see.

"The hard work of implementation" is only beginning, he acknowledged, inviting international organisations and experts to join the team building the centre.

Co-founder and Chairman of the Metis Institute, which advises the presidential administration on legislation, Marc Beau placed the initiative in broader context. He said the TIFC has completed two of three phases — conception and design — and is entering the third and most challenging: implementation. He pointed to the scale of the potential, citing the example of the Dubai International Financial Centre, which reportedly supports more than 30,000 high-paying jobs.

Beau said Uzbekistan has all the necessary preconditions to achieve a comparable result, given its young and growing population, the government's reform trajectory, and rising foreign investor interest.

Akshu Campbell-Holt, Head of Member Relations at the World Association of International Financial Centres (WAIFC), working in Astana and with direct experience of the establishment of the Astana International Financial Centre, cautioned that the TIFC is entering a crowded market. Among the association's members alone, financial centres operate in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Oman, and Astana.

She stressed, however, that no two international financial centres are identical, and that success depends on the ability to fit organically into the social, political, and cultural context of the host country.

She identified four practical priorities. The first is operational clarity in relations between the two jurisdictions: companies operating within the TIFC will inevitably interact with state bodies outside it — tax authorities, banks, customs — and the absence of clear agreed rules creates a black hole of uncertainty that undermines investor confidence. The second is enforcement of decisions as the real test of the dispute resolution system.

As a model, she cited Kazakhstan's International Financial Arbitration Centre (MFAC): despite its young age, the centre has handled more than 5,000 cases with a 100% enforcement rate and has returned assets worth approximately US$4.1 billion to the parties in disputes.

The third priority is attentiveness to the investor voice: investors encounter the real points of friction, and their feedback must be embedded in the system on an permanent basis. The fourth is the targeted development of capital markets, including Uzbekistan's inclusion in the MSCI and FTSE indices, and the use of the announced state asset privatisation programme as a powerful instrument for attracting foreign strategic investors.

Franklin Templeton representative Karen Sapirnov presented the results of the country's largest-ever securities placement. The IPO of Uzbekistan Chip Fund (UIF) was the largest on the London Stock Exchange in the past five years: the order book reached US$2.8 billion against an actual placement of more than US$600 million. He said the company conducted more than 200 investor meetings and organised an investor day in Tashkent attended by more than 100 institutional participants.

The central finding of this work: over the past five to ten years, the nature of interest in Uzbekistan has shifted qualitatively — from high-yield debt investors to long-term institutional equity holders with broad mandates who believe in company development rather than short-term trading returns. The successful IPO, Sapirnov said, proved to three categories of sceptics that legislation works, the government delivers on its commitments, and the infrastructure functions.

At the same time, he noted that market demand continues to significantly exceed the supply of available instruments.

Private investors, family offices, and strategic investors all want to work with Uzbekistan but often cannot find suitable instruments. The TIFC is intended to fill precisely this gap. As promising formats, Sapirnov identified bilateral loans, eurobonds, sukuk, and additional IPOs of companies from the presidential list approved under Decree No. 145, which covers a broad range of state enterprises planning to access the market.

BlackRock FMA Managing Director Kashif Riyaz presented a US$30 billion infrastructure investment platform created by BlackRock Global Infrastructure Partners together with Temasek and a Middle Eastern partner, targeting Central Asia and the Middle East.

He said the growing investment interest in the region is not coincidental but a natural result of an accumulated track record: a video shown at the forum's opening demonstrated the scale of capital inflows from a wide range of sources — from the east, the west, and the Middle East.

Riyaz offered two reference points for the architects of the TIFC.

The first: a financial centre must be organically embedded in the country's real economy and serve its key sectors — infrastructure, industry, agriculture, mineral resources, and energy — rather than existing in isolation from the surrounding economic environment.

The second: in an environment of growing competition among an increasing number of financial centres, compatibility is critical — of legal jurisdictions, fund structures, and key centre characteristics — allowing investors and issuers to operate across multiple platforms without friction.

General Counsel of Uzum, Uzbekistan's first technology unicorn, Sergei Salikov proposed three operational criteria the TIFC must meet.

The first is a digital platform for residents to interact with the regulator: no existing international financial centre yet offers a fully digital interface with government bodies, and this could be a genuine competitive advantage for Tashkent.

The second is impeccable compliance: the centre must under no circumstances be associated with offshore schemes or sanctions circumvention instruments.

Salikov said that even attractive zero tax rates cannot offset the reputational risks that would immediately deter serious investors. The third is mutual recognition agreements with other financial centres, including reciprocal KYC procedures: this would allow companies resident in the DIFC, ADGM, and QFC to establish subsidiaries within the TIFC in a simplified manner.

He also flagged the need to remove existing restrictions on cross-border transactions by individuals as a matter of priority, describing this as more pressing than the introduction of stablecoins.

Of particular importance, in Salikov's view, is the establishment of a framework of authorised banks with minimal deposit and capital requirements: this would provide a financial anchor for new residents and create incentives for the presence within the centre of brokerage firms, auditors, law firms, and financial intermediaries. Uzum, he said, has deep expertise in the relevant areas and is ready to participate in building the necessary infrastructure.

Moderating the discussion, Frankfurt Main Finance Managing Director Hubertus Väth closed the session with a symbolic exercise: each participant named a desired Financial Times headline ten years from now.

The range of responses reflected the scale of the shared ambition — from "Uzbekistan leads the G7" and "the country's GDP reaches US$1 trillion" to "the TIFC joins the leading global financial indices" and "a financial centre built by the people and for the people."

Väth concluded: in all his visits to Uzbekistan, he had never seen such a combination of political will and concrete implementation instruments as he saw today, and he wished the country success in turning all the stated ambitions into reality.