If only the story didn't so sound believable or typical. If true, the former president needs to be brought to justice. Disgusting.
The head of Kyrgyzstan's new interim government yesterday revealed that her country was broke and said that the former president who was overthrown in a street-led revolution this week had left only $80m in the budget.
In an interview with the Guardian, Roza Otunbayeva appealed for urgent international aid so that the impoverished Central Asian nation could meet its immediate bills. "Tomorrow we should pay pensions. This is a really serious problem," she said.
Otunbayeva said that the ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev had plundered the economy, installing his sons in key government positions and flogging off strategic state industries for a fraction of their true value.
She said the country's leading telecoms firm had been sold to an offshore company in the Canary Islands, belonging to a friend of the president's son Maxim. "We had an absolutely scandalous situation where Kyrgyzstan had become a family-run regime," she said.
