ALMATY (Reuters) - Uzbekistan’s once-powerful deputy prime minister, Rustam Azimov, has left his post after being appointed to another position, several Uzbek news websites reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

The government press office could not be reached for comment on the reports carried by a number of websites. One site, Gazeta.uz., said Azimov would now run the state export-import insurance company, marking a major demotion from his role running the economy and finance.

Azimov was once seen as a political heavyweight with whom President Shavkat Mirziyoyev effectively shared power following the death of veteran leader Islam Karimov last year.

Two news websites, Kun.uz and Gazeta.uz, said deputy finance minister Jamshid Kuchkarov would replace Azimov as deputy PM.

Diplomatic and business sources told Reuters that Azimov was part of a ruling triumvirate which also included state security boss Rustam Inoyatov.

In April, however, sources familiar with the government said Mirziyoyev had moved to consolidate his power by sidelining Azimov and personally overseeing a program of cautious economic change.

That effectively leaves Mirziyoyev and Inoyatov, head of the state security service SNB, as the two men sharing power in Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populous nation, potentially further centralizing decision-making.</s>Vice Prime Minister of Uzbekistan Rustam Azimov sacked

AKIPRESS.COM - President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev removed Rustam Azimov from the post of Vice Prime Minister in connection with appointment to another position, a sources close to the matter told UZ24.

Azimov's new position has not yet been reported.

The post of Vice Prime Minister was replaced by former First Deputy Minister of Finance Jamshed Kuchkarev.

Azimov served as Minister of Macroeconomics and Statistics in 2000-2002, Minister of Economy – in 2003-2005, Minister of Finance – in 2005-2016.

At the end of the last year, Azimov was appointed as Deputy Prime Minister, Head of the complex on macroeconomic development, structural reforms, attracting foreign investment and integrated development of regions.

The President has recently criticized Azimov for the failing to control over the activities of financiers saying “I should have fired you!”.</s>ALMATY (Reuters) - Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has harshly criticized officials in charge of finance and banking, asserting his power above one of two other members of a triumvirate that has ruled since the death last year of leader Islam Karimov.

FILE PHOTO: Uzbekistan's Prime Minister and interim President Shavkat Mirziyoyev leaves a voting booth at a polling station during a presidential election in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, December 4, 2016. REUTERS/Anvar Ilyasov/Pool/File Photo

In a leaked audio recording of a meeting, posted online, a voice recognizable as Mirziyoyev’s berates an official identified by news website Kun.uz as Deputy Central Bank Chairman Saidkamol Khodjaev and criticizing Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov.

The tape confirms that Azimov - one of the ruling triumvirate along with Rustam Inoyatov, head of the SNB state security service - is under pressure. It also suggests Mirziyoyev may make sweeping changes at the central bank which awaits the appointment of a new chairman and is supposed to be preparing a foreign exchange reform.

Sources told Reuters last month that Mirziyoyev has moved to consolidate his power by sidelining Azimov.

In the recording, Mirziyoyev scolds Khodjaev over idleness and corruption among the bank’s lower-level officials.

“Your bankers don’t like to work. Is it possible to make someone work who has enjoyed his post for 10 years? No, because he doesn’t listen to you and gets more money than we do. Don’t be offended, but he gets his bribes,” he says.

He then berates Azimov, who has long been in charge of financial matters, for ignoring those problems.

“If people like Azimov, who have firmly grabbed the system sitting in Tashkent had come down (worked with people in lower levels of the system) we wouldn’t have had this situation,” he says. It is unclear if Azimov was present at the meeting.

Mirziyoyev’s office did not reply to an emailed request for comment from Reuters but it has published a report about a May 30 teleconference chaired by Mirziyoyev in which “officials in charge of certain industries and regions came under strong criticism over lack of responsibility, exactingness and initiative”.

Uzbekistan, a predominantly Muslim nation of 32 million, has been in flux since Karimov died last year after ruling for 27 years. Mirziyoyev became president but effectively shared power with Azimov and Inoyatov.

Azimov’s apparent sidelining effectively leaves Mirziyoyev and security boss Inoyatov as the two men sharing power in Central Asia’s most populous nation.</s>Since the death of Islam Karimov and ascension of Shavkat Mirziyoyev, regional analysts have been scrying every move made by the new president and asking: is this reform or regime consolidation?

The news this week seems big: Rustam Azimov — who only months ago, as Karimov lay dying, was floated as a possible successor — looks to have been sidelined. Gazeta.uz, followed by RFE/RL and EurasiaNet have all reported that Azimov has been dismissed from his post as deputy prime minister and reassigned as the head of Uzbekinvest, a “national export-import insurance company.”

Azimov had been deputy prime minister since 2005 and until December 16 — two days after Mirziyoyev’s inauguration — he’d been finance minister (twice actually, 1998-2000 and 2005-2016). The writing was on the wall last week when Mirziyoyev laid into Azimov during a government meeting on May 30. Audio of the meeting was posted by RFE/RL’s Uzbek Bureau and EurasiaNet covered the screed Mirziyoyev had launched into, directed at Azimov:

“The axman should be sharpening his tools for Azimov,” EurasiaNet quipped last week — a prediction that seems to have been spot-on.

Few could argue against the necessity of reforms in Uzbekistan’s finance sectors. Cash shortages and payment delays have been recurring problems in Uzbekistan (see reports from 2009 and 2016), and corruption rampant.

In 2013, a year before her own downfall began to pick up steam, Karimov’s eldest daughter, Gulnara, accused Azimov of corruption. At the time, both Karimova and Azimov were seen as possible successors to Karimov. As reported by RFE/RL, Karimov had tweeted allegations that Azimov was worth $4 billion, “suggesting the money was not earned legally.” Others at the time, retweeted by Karimova, said “that Azimov was ‘a crook,’ who created ‘clever schemes to embezzle money.’” While this may be a case of the kettle calling the pot black — the projection of one’s own sins onto another — it would not be surprising if Azimov used his long tenure and high position for personal benefit.

So should we look at Azimov’s dismissal as the politics of regime consolidation or reform? The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive; my money is on a bit of both. We won’t known for some time if the dismissal leads to actual reform or just shifts the perks of a powerful post to a more amenable Mirziyoyev ally.

As power transitions are rare in Central Asia and hardly ever “normal,” there are few places to look for precedent. As Karimov had been Uzbekistan’s only president in the era of independence, we have no idea what a “normal” transition looks like. Mirziyoyev’s rise to the top eschewed the country’s Constitutional procedures, so we can’t look there for solid rules of how administrations transfer power and positions.

The case of Turkmenistan is perhaps the closest thing we have in the region to the kind of politics currently flowing through Uzbekistan. In 2007, Turkmenistan’s Soviet-era leader, Saparmurat Niyazov died. In a similar manner to Mirizyoyev’s extraconstitutional rise, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov — who had been minister of health in the late 1990s and deputy prime minister since 2001 — became president. His ascension was matched with an outpouring of hope, bolstered by early moves to unravel the absurdist personality cult of his predecessor. He too sacked powerful figures from the previous regime.

But a decade later, few would say Turkmenistan has come very far. Berdimuhamedov dismantled much of Niyazov’s cults and build his own in its place.

Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are significantly different countries, especially with regard to their international interactions. Inasmuch as Mirizyoyev’s rise mirrors that of Berdimuhamedov, the Uzbek leader seems to have made serious efforts to reorient the country’s regional and global relations in a way the Turkmen, bound by “positive neutrality,” did not. Whether Mirziyoyev is cleaning house of corrupt remnants of Karimov’s rule, or merely deposing internal rivals (and again, it’s could be a bit of both), will take time to truly assess.</s>Rustam Azimov was once seen as a potential future president of Uzbekistan but after several months of being made a scapegoat for the country's economic problems, he has reportedly been removed from his post as deputy prime minister.

Uzbek media broke the news of Azimov's dismissal on June 6, roughly six months after former Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev was elected president.

After longtime President Islam Karimov's death was announced at the start of September 2016, there was much debate over who would succeed the only president Uzbekistan had ever known as an independent country.

Mirziyaev and Azimov were seen as possible successors, with the head of the National Security Service (SNB), Rustam Inoyatov, acting as kingmaker.

In the period between Karimov's death and the December 4 presidential election, it appeared all three men worked together to preserve an image of stability in Uzbekistan.

Mirziyaev was sworn into office on December 14 and relieved Azimov of the post of finance minister the next day, but Azimov remained a deputy prime minister in charge of macroeconomic development, structural reform, management of foreign investment, education, and science.

In January, Mirziyaev criticized Azimov for the failure of the bank-card payment system in Uzbekistan, whereby salaries, pensions, and other payments are deposited directly into banks and people are expected to withdraw money from automatic teller machines. State media reported on a pensioners' protest in the southern city of Denau, where elderly people complained they could not access their pensions reliably using the bank cards they had been given.

It was a rare event in a country where protests are broken up quickly and organizers taken away by police, and another indication Azimov's days in government were probably numbered.

At a special government meeting on investment on May 29, Mirziyaev lashed out at the country's ineffective banking system and bankers, questioning why a promised $2 billion investment from Turkey had failed to materialize.

Mirziyaev laid the blame on Azimov. "If Azimov, working in Tashkent, had controlled these matters from top to bottom, this wouldn't have happened," Mirziyaev said.

Mirziyaev's choice of words show his reputed disdain for urbane bureaucrats who work in offices; as prime minister, he was known for traveling around Uzbekistan, visiting factories and farms.

After the dressing-down on May 29, Azimov requested that he be released from his post, saying he was tired of taking the blame for all of Uzbekistan's financial woes.

The Gazeta.uz website reported that Azimov was put in charge of the state export-import insurance company Uzbekinvest.

The post of chairman of the Central Bank remains vacant following the May 23 death of longtime head Fayzulla Mullajonov, but it appears unlikely Azimov will be named as his replacement.

Azimov had been in the Uzbek government since 1998 -- always involved in finance, and including two stints as finance minister -- after spending the first years after Uzbekistan's independence as the country's point man dealing with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

His replacement as deputy prime minister is Jamshid Kuchkarov, who was serving as deputy finance minister.

Zamira Eshanova of RFE/RL's Uzbek Service contributed to this report. The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL</s>TASHKENT -- Media reports in Uzbekistan say Rustam Azimov, a long-influential official who had been seen as a possible successor to the late President Islam Karimov, has been dismissed from the post of deputy prime minister.

The reports on June 6 said that Azimov has been replaced by former Deputy Finance Minister Jamshid Kuchkarov due to his "move to another post." No specific position was named, and there was no immediate comment from the government.

Azimov, 58, had been seen as one of three main possible successors to Karimov, whose death was announced on September 2 after more than a quarter-century of autocratic rule in the most populous former Soviet republic in Central Asia.

But longtime Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev was installed as interim president and then elected in a tightly controlled December 4 vote.

Mirziyaev promised major personnel changes in the government when he was inaugurated on December 14.

Azimov, who for many years combined the responsibilities of finance minister and deputy prime minister responsible for macroeconomic development and foreign investment, was relieved from the post of finance minister two days later.</s>ALMATY: Uzbekistan's deputy prime minister, Rustam Azimov, has left his post after being appointed to another position, Uzbek news websites Kun.uz and Uz24.uz reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources who did not say what his new job would be.

The Uzbek government's press office could not be reached for comment. In charge of economy and finance, Azimov was once seen as a political heavyweight with whom President Shavkat Mirziyoyev initially shared power following the death of veteran leader Islam Karimov last year.</s>Rustam Azimov, who previously served as deputy prime minister of Uzbekistan, has been appointed as the new director general of the Uzbekinvest National Export-Import Insurance Company, a representative of the insurance company told Trend.

Meanwhile, the Uzbek president’s office told Trend that according to a presidential decree, Azimov has been dismissed from his post of the deputy prime minister in connection with the appointment to another position.

Rustam Azimov was the country’s Macroeconomy and Statistics Minister in 2000-2002, Economy Minister – in 2003-2005. He served as Uzbekistan’s First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2016.

In December 2016, Azimov was dismissed from his position of the Finance Minister and was appointed Uzbekistan’s Deputy Prime Minister.
Uzbekistan Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov is dismissed by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who had earlier criticized Azimov for failing to control financiers' activities. He is replaced by former Deputy Finance Minister Jamshed Kuchkarev.