98 Percent: How Big Oil Wrote Kazakhstan a Deal It Could Never Win

The number at the center of this story is 98. As in, 98 percent of post-royalty oil revenue from Kazakhstan's Kashagan field - one of the biggest petroleum discoveries since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay - reportedly went not to the country sitting on top of it, but to a consortium of Western and Chinese energy majors. Kazakhstan received roughly 2 percent.

That figure emerged not from a leak or a whistleblower, but from a confidential interim ruling in an ongoing $160 billion arbitration case. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained a copy. The number appears in the ruling almost as an aside - mentioned "in context" by Kazakhstan's legal team while arguing about an environmental fine. Which means, if the ICIJ's reading is accurate, that Kazakhstan has been arguing in a secret Geneva courtroom for years that it was systematically stripped of the wealth beneath its own soil.

The Deal That Was Never Published

The Kashagan production-sharing agreement was signed in 1997. Kazakhstan had been independent from the Soviet Union for six years. Its government was new, its institutions thin, and its knowledge of international petroleum law was built on the fly. On the other side of the table: Shell, ExxonMobil, Eni, TotalEnergies, China National Petroleum Company, and Japan's Inpex - collectively among the most experienced contract negotiators in the world.

The agreement has never been published. Not in 1997. Not in 2008 when it was supposedly revised to improve Kazakhstan's share. Not now. The consortium operating the field - the North Caspian Operating Company (NCOC) - is a private vehicle owned by those companies. Its financial arrangements with the Kazakh state are, formally, none of the public's business.

What Kazakhstan's analysts have since calculated: between 2016 and 2023, Kazakhstan received $1.1 billion through the profit-sharing mechanism in the Kashagan agreement. The consortium sold an estimated $55 billion in oil over the same period. Even accounting for the $86 billion the companies claim to have spent developing the field, the arithmetic does not flatter the deal.

The Oligarch in the Middle

Before the arbitration, before the environmental fines, before the Swiss lawsuit - there was Timur Kulibayev. He is the son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who governed Kazakhstan for nearly 30 years. In the oil industry, Kulibayev was known as the "oil prince."

A company called TenizService, partly owned by Kulibayev until 2010, won a no-bid contract to build a $1.06 billion offloading facility at Tengiz, another Caspian field. By the time the project was finished, Chevron and ExxonMobil had paid TenizService $2.5 billion - $1.5 billion beyond the original price. Internal documents reviewed by ICIJ show oil company employees flagged that payments to politically connected contractors could be seen as improper. The deal went ahead anyway.

When TenizService needed financial backing, it turned to a bank in which Kulibayev held a large stake. Chevron had previously rejected a similar project on safety and environmental grounds in 2009. The same project, pitched by a different firm with the right connections, sailed through 170 regulatory approvals across 46 government entities in a matter of months. The firm's pitch cited its "good relations" with the government as a key asset.

Eni and the Swiss Lawsuit

In March 2025, Kazakhstan's arbitration body filed a civil complaint in Switzerland. The claim: that embezzlement schemes at Kashagan and a second field, Karachaganak, were used to bribe officials in Kazakhstan and - critically - to "remunerate certain Eni executives" and their intermediaries, between 2006 and 2011.

Eni is a publicly listed company. The Italian government owns a stake. Its executives were allegedly receiving payments from schemes tied to Kazakhstan's national oil infrastructure. The Swiss complaint targets alleged intermediaries in the scheme, not Eni directly. But the allegation is in a filed legal document, in Switzerland, and it names the company's executives as beneficiaries.

Eni has not addressed these specific allegations publicly. TotalEnergies and Eni have publicly called Kazakhstan's broader arbitration claim unfounded and said they are "united" to fight it. ExxonMobil has not commented publicly on the arbitration.

A Court No One Elected

The $160 billion case is registered with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague - one of the oldest international dispute-settlement bodies in the world, founded in 1899. The actual hearings are in Geneva. The proceedings are sealed. No transcripts are released. No decisions are published unless both parties agree. The case is expected to run until at least 2028.

This is how the largest resource disputes on earth are settled: in private rooms, by private tribunals, under rules that explicitly shield the proceedings from public scrutiny. There is no press gallery. No public interest override. No mechanism for Kazakhstan's citizens - whose oil it is - to know what arguments are being made in their name, or against them.

The only reason anyone knows the 98 percent figure exists is because it appeared as a passing reference in an interim ruling about an environmental fine. An ICIJ team obtained that document. Without them, the number stays buried.

Tokayev's Gambit

Kazakhstan's current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, inherited these contracts from Nazarbayev. He has taken a more aggressive posture with NCOC than his predecessor - levying the $5 billion environmental fine that NCOC is now calling a "naked cash grab," and pushing for renegotiation of production terms across all major fields. In January, he ordered the government to pursue better terms on existing agreements.

The risk is real. Challenging a $60 billion investment by a consortium of global oil majors, in a country that depends on oil for roughly half its government revenue, is not a safe play. Paolo Sorbello, editor at Kazakh independent outlet Vlast.kz and an expert on the country's oil sector, put it plainly: "By lodging such a massive claim, despite clear contract terms, the Kazakh government could turn a generational oil find into an endless courtroom battle."

But the counter-argument is just as stark. If the 98 percent figure holds up in arbitration, then Kazakhstan has spent nearly three decades providing the land, the workforce, the regulatory access, and the political stability for international companies to extract its wealth at terms a colonial-era concession holder might have demanded.

The hearings continue in Geneva. Behind closed doors. The documents stay sealed. The number - 98 - sits in a ruling that was never supposed to be public.