The town of Stepnogorsk, a remote speck of civilization in the northern steppe of Kazakhstan, is straight out of a Cold War thriller. For decades, it was a secret—nowhere to be found on a map. It was a company town, and its business was, in part, producing weaponized anthrax. After the Soviet Union dissolved, Stepnogorsk moved away from biological warfare, turning to exploiting vast uranium deposits in the region.
It sounds like a princely sum. But Carroll’s experience will go down as one of the great cautionary tales emerging from the ‘Wild East’ era of post-Soviet development. At first, he had no interest in Kazakh uranium. Carroll’s initial visit to post-Soviet Kazakhstan was all about gold. A longtime player in Canada’s mining industry, he ventured to central Asia in 1995 as the fledgling nation rushed to privatize natural resource development after decades under the thumb of Soviet masters.
The Kazakh government claims withholding the licence was in its citizens’ best interests. In a press release after the arbitrators’ decision, the ministry of justice claimed World Wide “began to breach the terms of its trust management agreement by failing to pay salaries to employees” in April 1997. “The work at many of the enterprises of TGK was suspended, coal reserves were exhausted, and social tension amongst the population increased as a result,” reads the release.
That’s when one of Carroll’s lawyers hatched an idea that prompted the final, successful gambit. In another attempt at arbitration in 2015, World Wide claimed an old 1989 USSR-Canada bilateral investment treaty, the terms of which would have treated World Wide favourably, applied to Kazakhstan as a successor state. Arbitrators eventually agreed. Four years later came the $52.6-million award.