Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Raghi.

We're at TED 2022 in Vancouver this week, and I'm speaking with Bechtar.

Bektur is a TED fellow and the co-founder of Klupe, a leading news website in Kyrgyzstan.

He is committed to training young journalists to cover politics and for our purposes to investigate

corruption. He has collaborated with the OCCRP, a group that has won the Trace Prize for

Investigative Reporting. Bektur, thank you for joining me amid the busy TED schedule.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

Can you tell us a little bit about your work in Kyrgyzstan?

You did a great TED talk on this at the beginning of the event,

but in particular about the corruption and the schemes that you've looked at there.

Kyrgyzstan is so interesting, you know, because it's such a controversial country.

On one hand, we've had so many successes, and especially when it comes, you know, to fighting for

freedom of speech, to fighting for political diversity, or, I don't know, to ensuring, you know,

like more or less free and fair elections, although it should be

taken with a grain of salt, then Kyrgyzstan was pretty much successful. But when it comes to

corruption, this is, I think, one of the biggest failures of our country since we became independent

in 1991, because Kyrgyzstan is very poor. And on one hand it was really a blessing that we didn't

have natural resources like oil and gas when we became independent. That would probably lead to even

more corruption, you know, as example of some of our neighboring countries showed. On the other hand,

because we are so poor and had a very poor leadership,

this led just to other types of corruption. And if we look at Kyrgyzstan today, I think the biggest

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