Gulnara Karimova (pictured) has been charged in an indictment lodged in the Southern District of New York with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. She is the eldest daughter of deceased former Uzbek President Islam Karimov and a former official in her own right.

Karimova, 46, allegedly influenced the Uzbek governmental body that regulated the telecom industry. Bekhzod Akhmedov, 44, a citizen of Uzbekistan and a former Uzbek executive, was charged in the same indictment with one count of conspiracy to break the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act 1977, two counts of actually breaking that law and one count of conspiracy to launder money.

Gulnara Karimova stands accused of exploiting her official position to solicit and accept more than $865 million in bribes from three publicly traded telecom companies, and then of washing those bribes through the US financial system.

This is the third instalment in a trilogy of cases arising from a bribery scheme involving $866 million that reached the highest echelons of the Uzbek government and was allegedly orchestrated by some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. By funneling multimillion-dollar bribe payments through the US financial system, the companies and individual defendants corruptly tried to tip the global economy in their favor and line their own pockets, according to the prosecutors' allegations.

In 2001-12, according to the indictment, the pair took part in a series of bribes before which Karimova demanded, and Akhmedov and his co-conspirators agreed to pay, hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Karimova on behalf of three global telecommunications companies that wanted to obtain and retain business in Uzbekistan. Akhmedov, acting as both an executive of one of the companies and as Karimova's personal representative, allegedly solicited and facilitated bribe payments from the three telecoms companies and their subsidiaries to shell companies controlled by Karimova, who at the time was a government official. In furtherance of the conspiracy, the pair allegedly conspired with others to wash the proceeds through bank accounts in the United States.

Karimova is now under house arrest and is facing five years in an Uzbek penal colony. Her lawyer complains that Uzbekistan’s authorities “continue to exert psychological and physical pressure on her to force her to withdraw her appeals and abandon all her rights and property in Switzerland," according to Radio Free Europe.

In the meantime, Moscow-based Mobile TeleSystems PJSC (MTS), the largest mobile telecommunications company in Russia and an issuer of publicly traded securities in the United States, and its wholly owned Uzbek subsidiary, KOLORIT DIZAYN INK LLC, have prostrated themselves before the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission and agreed to pay a combined total penalty of $850 million.