McDonald’s restaurants suspended in Kazakhstan
ALMA-ATA, November 18 – RIA Novosti. McDonald’s chain restaurants in Kazakhstan suspended operations Friday, workers declined to comment.
On Thursday, McDonald’s (Food Solutions KZ LLP) in Kazakhstan announced on its website and social networks that it will suspend the operations of all its restaurants from November 18 due to restrictions on local ingredients. The company pledged to announce the reopening date of the restaurants later, assuring it is making every effort to reopen as soon as possible.
According to an RIA Novosti correspondent from Alma-Ata, the chain’s restaurants are closed on Friday. “Technical break” is displayed on the electronic scoreboard to order from a cart near one of the restaurants. All doors and windows are pasted with advertisements, the text of which repeats the message from the site. “Follow the news on McDonald’s official website and on social networks,” the announcement said. An employee of one of the chain’s restaurants said in an interview with RIA Novosti that he did not know about the timing of his return to work and declined to comment further, citing company policy.
The franchise owner of McDonald’s in Kazakhstan is Kairat Boranbaev, a big businessman who is ranked 14th in the ranking of the richest businessmen in the country according to Forbes Kazakhstan magazine in 2021 with a fortune of 590 million dollars.
On March 17, the Kazakhstan Financial Monitoring Agency (AFM) announced that Boranbaev had been arrested in a particularly large-scale embezzlement case in the semi-public sector. In September, the agency announced that it had completed an investigation into one of the gas thefts of approximately $30 million from the national gas company. According to AFM, 38 billion tenge ($80 million) of cash and 4.2 billion tenge ($8.8 million) of property were seized in the investigation.
Boranbaev also owned a McDonald’s franchise in Belarus and a number of Russian regions. It also has assets in the real estate, oil and gas industry. It is a shareholder of the Karaganda pharmaceutical complex, which produces Russia’s coronavirus “Sputnik V” vaccine. He heads the “Kairat” football club and the Supervisory Board of the National Paralympic Committee. Over the years, he held senior positions in the group companies of the national oil and gas company KazMunayGas. Boranbayev’s daughter Alima married the granddaughter of Kazakhstan’s former president Aisultan Nazarbayev, who died in 2020.
Source: Ria
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