Over a hundred families in Almaty have appealed to the President and the Prosecutor General, asking them to investigate a conflict with the «Metastudy» training centre. According to the parents, the centre collected significant sums for preparing children for entry to prestigious schools, then closed down, and the families were unable to get their money back. The parents claim the police dropped the criminal case, deeming it a civil dispute.
According to Cmn.kz, in 2024–2025 Metastudy actively advertised its entrance preparation services. Instagram posts featured videos with the former director of Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, Nurgali Yelshimbekov, who promised a high standard of preparation for exams to elite educational institutions. Parents were offered a money-back guarantee if their child was not admitted, and a substantial discount for paying for the annual course upfront.
According to the parents, after the tuition was paid, the centre stopped fulfilling its obligations: offices closed, phones and messaging services went unanswered, and social media pages were closed to comments. The parents joined forces and established that at least one hundred families had been affected, although the exact number of victims is unknown.
One mother, Malika Berdibayeva, said she took out a payment plan and paid around 1.4 million tenge for a year of tuition for her two children.
"During the holidays, via the general Metastudy student chat, another parent contacted me and asked: 'Do you know the centre is no longer there?' I replied that I knew nothing about it. I went on 2GIS, and there they had disappeared as a company. I tried to contact the coordinator we had been in touch with over the previous seven months, but the Metastudy general number was no longer working. No one replied on Telegram either. I wasn't notified that the centre was closing. There was no information at all; the office simply vanished," the message states.
Another mother — Gaukhar Mukhamadiyeva — told a similar story: in February of this year she signed a contract and paid 939,000 tenge for her son's tuition.
"As it turned out later, there is no education whatsoever at this centre, because my son said that sometimes there was no teacher, sometimes they changed daily, and sometimes lessons were cancelled. They didn't have classes on holidays. After two months, I decided to go to the centre myself and was shocked. It was just filthy all around, and the children were left to their own devices. There weren't even any teachers there," the woman says.
Mukhamadiyeva submitted a request to terminate the contract and demanded a refund, but received no response. Together with other parents, she filed a collective complaint with the police, but the case was closed "due to the lack of corpus delicti".
In the ruling to discontinue the criminal case, the investigator concluded that the actions of the training centre's management lacked the signs of intentional misappropriation of others' funds. The document states that Metastudy fulfilled its obligations and refunded money upon client requests until the point it encountered financial difficulties.
"Due to the onset of financial difficulties and the subsequent initiation of bankruptcy proceedings, the training centre was unable to process refunds in a timely manner, despite having received relevant requests from clients," the ruling states.
Ultimately, the investigator classified the dispute as civil and discontinued the criminal proceedings.
The citizens disagree with the closure of the case and believe there were signs of abuse and unfair business practices.
The parents are seeking to have the decision to close the case declared unlawful. They have appealed the ruling of the investigative department to the Specialised Inter-District Investigative Court of Almaty. The court consolidated three appeals into a single case, and the materials from the pre-trial investigation were transferred to the police of the Almaly District. However, to date, this chain of procedures has yielded no significant results.