AKIPRESS.COM - Sensing change in his native Uzbekistan, Hikmat Abdurahmonov plans to build a 10-storey office block and open a consultancy firm oriented toward foreign trade. In neighboring Kazakhstan, banker Umut Shayakhmetova is considering an Uzbek subsidiary, Reuters said.

“There is hope in the air,” she says.

Their plans, commonplace in many countries, are striking because Uzbekistan, as Shayakhmetova puts it, is “starting from zero”.

Until the death last year of former president Islam Karimov, it was one of the world’s most isolated states. Karimov, who came to power in communist times, kept an iron grip on the economy and politics and mistrusted both Russia and the West.

Since then, foreign delegations have been beating a path to the capital Tashkent, drawn by the potential of the Central Asian country’s oil and gas and vast cotton crop as well as areas such as car and food production, machinery and chemicals.

They also have political concerns: Uzbeks from a long-oppressed Muslim population have been arrested for attacks on civilians in New York, Istanbul, Stockholm and St Petersburg this year that killed at least 65 people and wounded many more.

Karimov’s successor, his longtime prime minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has maintained the top-down political system while starting tentative reforms to an economy that had failed to create jobs, fuelling discontent.

In August, the country said it would abolish, in 2019, the exit visa system that prevented Uzbeks leaving without official permission, easing the path of millions of migrant workers whose remittances, mostly from Russia, are a vital source of income.

A month later it stopped sending students, teachers and medical workers to harvest cotton after a global boycott campaign, and scrapped most of the capital controls that had bolstered state reserves but stifled trade and investment.

For Abdurahmonov, 36, who has run property, trade, finance and other businesses and lived in the United States, Britain, China and Singapore, the currency reform means he can focus on making money instead of tracking it down in an opaque system.

“I think you can feel it in the air how the atmosphere is really changing,” he said in an interview at his three-storey, loft-style office building on the eastern outskirts of Tashkent.

“People are planning new businesses, you can see a lot of start-ups coming (to us).”