SENTOSA ISLAND, SINGAPORE — If you were to stroll past the manicured lawns and waterfront villas on Paradise Island, you might think you’d found Asia’s answer to Palm Beach. The air is salt-sweet, the roads quiet, the neighbors discreet. Billionaires park yachts in backyards, and hedge funders unwind behind hedges. But tucked behind one villa’s towering white façade—number 3, to be exact—is a name that doesn’t appear on the title deed. Not on the mailbox. Not on the intercom.
The name is Dinmukhamet Idrisov—or, to his peers in Kazakhstan’s elite, Dini.
And this villa, along with a shadowy portfolio of holding companies headquartered in Singapore’s financial district, is at the center of what some financial observers are calling one of Central Asia’s most enigmatic offshore plays.
The Art of Disappearing in Plain Sight
On January 2nd, 2013, a company called Dragon Fortune Pte Ltd was born. It didn’t make headlines. It wasn’t listed on any major exchange. But it was special—capitalized with an eye-popping $172.6 million and registered as an exempt private company limited by shares.
For five years, it sat quietly in a glassy high-rise on Cross Street, a stone’s throw from the Marina Bay Sands. Its listed owner? Dinmukhamet Idrisov, one of Kazakhstan’s most powerful industrialists. His empire at home, the Ordabasy Group, ran everything from gas networks to telecoms. But this new company—this Dragon—was offshore, opaque, and strangely inactive.
Until 2018, when he handed it over. Not to a business partner. Not to a trust. But to his 24-year-old son, Zharmukhamed Appaz.
A Family Affair
If Idrisov was Kazakhstan’s archetype of post-Soviet industrial success—a man who made his fortune in oil rigs, industrial parts, and political connections—his son Zharmukhamed was the heir to a new kind of power: international, untraceable, and algorithmic.
After taking the reins of Dragon Fortune, Zharmukhamed oversaw the creation of a cluster of new entities: Dragon Fortune Logistics, Dragon Fortune Digital, and Infinity Properties Management. Each was housed at prestigious Singaporean business addresses. Each was carefully carved out with the kind of precision that would make a Swiss banker blush. And none has published a single annual report disclosing business activity.
“They’re a holding pattern,” said one Singapore-based financial consultant familiar with the setup. “You create a few shells. You park the money. You wait for the world to change.”
And change, it did.
From Bodrum With Love (and Losses)
Of the handful of known Dragon Fortune investments, the most cinematic is a stake in Kaplankaya Holdings, a company behind the Six Senses Kaplankaya Resort, perched on the Aegean coast of Turkey.
Designed to lure wellness tourists and discreet billionaires, the resort was billed as a Mediterranean Eden—yoga retreats for royals, IV drips for crypto millionaires, all under the InterContinental Hotels Group umbrella.
Dragon Fortune owns 25% of the project. Or rather, it owns 25% of the holding company that owns the project. The rest is held by a U.S.-based vehicle called ASYL Holdings LLC.
But something’s off. Since 2020, the resort has reported zero revenue under Kaplankaya’s Singapore registration. Financial statements show negative equity and recurring losses. The pandemic gutted operations. Villas sit half-built. An insider described the investment as a “tax-subsidized sand trap.”
“Is it a vanity stake? A write-off? A placeholder?” mused a Turkish hospitality executive familiar with the deal. “You tell me.”
The Curious Case of the Kazakh Loan
Back in Kazakhstan, meanwhile, another piece of the puzzle emerged: Kazakhstan Utility Systems, a domestic utility company controlled by Idrisov’s Ordabasy Group, issued a $5.1 million loan to Dragon Fortune in 2018. Interest rate? 2%. Repayment deadline? Extended three times, ultimately due in 2022.
According to Fitch Ratings, which flagged the loan in their reports, the money moved without clear public justification. “That’s not a commercial loan. That’s a balance sheet massage,” said a former regional banker. “You’re pumping cash out of a utility into an offshore safe zone.”
Officially, the loan has not been repaid. Unofficially? No one’s talking.
The Proxy Man
One name, however, does keep appearing: Shingis Madakhmetov, a Singapore-based Kazakh national and the listed director of nearly every Dragon Fortune entity. His LinkedIn profile reads like a finance thriller: KazMunayGas alumnus, former OCBC private banker, expert in cross-border transactions.
“He’s the guy who makes the trains run on time,” a source close to the Kazakh business community in Singapore told Vanity Fair. “Not a shareholder. Not a founder. Just the guy you call when you want your wealth to disappear legally.”
Madakhmetov has signed off on documents, held board positions, and is the registered tenant of the family’s D’Leedon apartment—another high-end property in Singapore not owned in name by any Idrisov.
Law and Disorder
None of this is technically illegal. In Singapore, exempt private companies don’t have to disclose much. Leasing a Sentosa Island mansion from a local nominee is permissible. Taking a loan from a company you own and pushing it to your son’s offshore firm? Dubious, but within the gray.
But Kazakhstan is no longer looking the other way.
In 2022, following the political purges and the imprisonment of former elites, the country passed the Law on Return of Illegally Withdrawn Assets, which empowers authorities to demand disclosure—and repatriation—of foreign-held assets over $1 million, including those held by spouses, children, or proxies.
And Dragon Fortune, with its lavish capitalization, thin paper trail, and suspiciously familial ownership, could very well be the first domino.
The World Is Watching
Singapore, too, is changing. The Financial Action Task Force has urged the city-state to increase scrutiny of PEPs—politically exposed persons—and bolster transparency in real estate and corporate services.
“I would not be surprised if regulators are already monitoring Dragon Fortune,” said a compliance executive at a global bank. “If they aren’t, they should be.”
In Turkey, local developers say the Kaplankaya project is “dead money,” and lawyers involved in the project claim that foreign shareholders are now considering an “exit route” from the investment. But where does one exit from a structure that may have never arrived?
The Empire and the Echo
So is Dragon Fortune an investment vehicle? A family office? A funnel?
The truth may lie somewhere in between. A former Singapore official said it best: “These aren’t money-laundering operations. They’re wealth-concealing operations. You’re not hiding dirty money. You’re hiding clean money from future scrutiny.”
Back in Kazakhstan, investigators may already be drawing lines from Shymkent to Sentosa. And in Singapore, Dragon Fortune’s doors remain closed—its name promising wealth, but perhaps, in the end, delivering only silence.
