Forensic examination is needed so that the court receives an expert's opinion on a matter requiring specialised knowledge. In the dispute over the FBRK article about problems at the A.I. Barayev Research and Production Centre for Grain Farming (NPTSZKH), that matter was the distinction between a statement of fact and a retelling of someone else's version. In this case, that distinction decides almost everything. But the report that was supposed to draw it itself requires scrutiny: it examines part of the text instead of the whole, drops key words from quotations and hardly answers the questions the court posed.
WHAT THE CLAIMANTS ARE DISPUTING AND WHY THE LOGIC OF THE CLAIM FAILS
On 20 May 2026, FBRK published an article based on a letter from the chief accountant of the A.I. Barayev Research and Production Centre for Grain Farming (NPTSZKH), Gulnar Kabdina, to state bodies. And on 10 June, the centre's director, Bauyrzhan Kalibayev, and the deputy chairman of the board for science, Yuri Dolinny, sent FBRK a pre-action letter demanding the removal of the publications and the publication of a retraction.
FBRK's editorial team, in turn, prepared a reply and sent it, but by the time it reached the addressee, the claim was already before the court at the acceptance stage. As it turned out, no one waited for a reply within the established time limit: the court received the claim before FBRK's time to respond had expired.
At the same time, we were, in effect, left with no opportunity to settle the dispute amicably. The claimants' side stated that there was no contact with the editorial team, although it had all the contact details.
All of this creates the impression that the process was deliberately rushed, leaving no time for a proper response and counting on outpacing FBRK in the procedural race.
The result was a civil claim: the claimants seek to have the information declared unreliable and to recover KZT 2 million in moral damages.
The logic of these demands raises questions, to say the least. Firstly, what is being challenged is not even the letter to the state bodies itself, but its journalistic retelling, in which the source is named in the very first lines. Secondly, the claim asks the court to declare unreliable the information in the article "and in the materials related to it", without naming specific phrases. At the same time, it itself quotes the Supreme Court's clarification that the court must specify exactly which information has been declared unreliable. Thirdly, according to the claimants' logic, the unreliability is evidenced by an audit by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) conducted in December 2025. But Kalibayev took charge of the Centre in January 2026, meaning the audit preceded the events in question.
And these are just the minor oddities you notice on first acquaintance with the case. Then, in September, the company Forensic․KZ conducted a full (purely theoretically) psycholinguistic and philological examination, and it is here that far more grounds for doubt arise. So much so that, as you study the document, it becomes increasingly difficult to perceive it as a study that genuinely clarifies the circumstances of the case.
Let us go through the experts' report.
WHY THE EXPERT EXAMINED NOT THE ENTIRE TEXT OF THE PUBLICATION
The object of the examination, for some unclear reason, was only two paragraphs, rather than the entire publication. The report states outright that "a fragment of the text is subject to examination", apparently not quite realising that paragraph 3 of point 14 of the Supreme Court's Normative Resolution requires that the object of a linguistic examination be the entire text. The court's questions, admittedly, covered only two of the subjects from the long list in the claim: the "era of chaos", the sale of property through a third-party organisation, and the cost of hay at KZT 225,000 per tonne. But even within these subjects, the expert Banu Sagidanova worked with a very noticeable excerpt.
The article is named as the object, yet only two Telegram links are provided. There is no link to the website, nor is there a date of inspection, the volume of the text or the method of recording. The Telegram post itself refers the reader to the full article on the FBRK website, so it is impossible to tell from the report whether the expert saw the article in full. At the same time, the context she constantly refers to is critically truncated, and the introductory part of the text has dropped out entirely.
WHERE THE PHRASE "ACCORDING TO KABDINA'S VERSION" DISAPPEARED FROM THE REPORT
The truncated context plays a key role in this case, as the expert herself ought to know. The introductory part shows that the reader is dealing with a retelling of someone else's letter. The phrase key to this case reads: "According to Kabdina's version, Kalibayev also demanded the creation of a fictitious electronic invoice". The expert acknowledges that "according to Kabdina's version" is a source marker, and herself points out in the theoretical part that an opinion presupposes the identification of the person holding it. And here that person is named directly. Nevertheless, the report asserts that there are no markers of opinion.
In the retelling of the disputed phrase, the words "according to Kabdina's version" simply disappear - and what had been attributed to a source suddenly turns into a statement of fact.
The approach to linguistic devices is equally selective. The word "allegedly" is treated by the expert as expressing the author's distancing, while "according to the version" and "according to available data" are not even tested for their degree of categoricalness. As a result, the report answers what is contained in Kabdina's version, but does not answer how our editorial team presented it to the reader: in its own name or as the position of another person. And the distinction between these two cases, let us recall, is the very essence of the dispute.
IS THERE NEGATIVE INFORMATION ABOUT YURI DOLINNY IN THE PUBLICATION
The logic cracks even more noticeably in the section on Dolinny. The expert writes that information about his commission of "any negatively characterised action is absent". And immediately notes negative information about him, because his surname is named "in a generally negative context". But proximity to other people's staffing decisions is not a linguistic construction that carries negativity about the person himself, and the report does not identify any such construction.
A similar substitution, for it cannot be called anything else, is visible in relation to Kalibayev. Who "transferred" and "appointed" is not stated in the text. The expert acknowledges that the subject is not named, and adds that the actions "may be correlated" with Kalibayev. An assumption about who made staffing decisions is not linguistics, yet in the conclusions it becomes "negative information in relation to Kalibayev".
WHICH SUPREME COURT RESOLUTION THE EXPERT APPLIED
The legal foundation is also incorrect. The expert relies on the Supreme Court's Normative Resolution of 18 December 1992, which ceased to be in force with the adoption of the corresponding resolution of 20 May 2026. The examination was conducted in August-September, that is, while the new act was in force. This is not a formality, since it is precisely the new resolution that contains the very requirement to examine the entire text that remained unapplied.
DID THE EXAMINATION ANSWER THE COURT'S QUESTIONS
The court posed two questions: whether the two named blocks contain information defamatory to the claimants, and if so, in what form it is expressed. The expert "for the sake of convenience" merged them into a single examination, and the conclusion was correspondingly so.
The answer on the question of defamatory character is conditional. A verification of reliability, the expert writes, is impossible, and the information about Kalibayev "in the event of its inconsistency with reality" may be classified as defamatory. There is no such conclusion about Dolinny at all. There is also no separate answer for each of the two blocks in the final part. And for Dolinny, the form of the information is not identified as an opinion, an assessment or a statement. Although the question was posed specifically, no specific answer was given to it.
How the document was drafted is also telling. The court's questions are reproduced twice, with the surname "Dolinsky" instead of "Dolinny". A noticeable part of the volume is taken up by textbook definitions of honour, dignity and reputation, as well as the four ways of expressing information, yet not one of them is ever applied to the text.
The dates also diverge. A covering letter dated 10 September 2026 sends the report "No. 192 of 10 August 2026", produced under the court's ruling of 14 August, meaning the report is dated earlier than the ruling under which it was written. The report itself is dated 10 September and states that the ruling was received on 19 August. In the letter to the judge, only Kalibayev is named as a claimant; Dolinny has disappeared from it entirely.
And all of this is presented as an expert report.
It was prepared by Forensic․KZ LLP, and the letter was signed by the company's head, Dulat Gauriyev. As is well known, any organisation whose report claims to serve as evidence in a public dispute has founders, directors and a biography. And there is a feeling that there may well be quite a few curious details there.
For example, Gauriyev himself until recently held the position of director of the Centre for Forensic Examinations of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Kazakhstan, directly participating in the regulation of expert certification. And among the former leadership there are the current chairman of the Republican Chamber of Forensic Experts of the Republic of Kazakhstan - Arman Bekmaganbetov, the former head of the apparatus of the Ministry of Justice - Askar Umbetaliyev, and also Maxim Popov, a member of the Audit Commission of that same Republican Chamber.
The company also has a branch in Almaty, headed by Galymzhan Khodzhamuratov, who is also the head of the Almaty branch of the Republican Chamber of Forensic Experts of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
It is obvious that these people must, by definition, have plenty of experience in forensic examination.
And yet, questions about the company's expert services are not arising for the first time. Quite recently, lawyer Saule Kobzhanova reported that in her case too, the appellate panel instructed the company to conduct a repeat commission psycholinguistic and philological examination. According to the lawyer, the Almaty branch priced it at KZT 3.5 million - 26.6 times more expensive than the initial examination of the same texts at a state body, which cost KZT 131,403. Moreover, Kobzhanova claims, no cost calculation was provided.
According to her description, the 18-page report largely consists of reproducing the disputed publications and essentially duplicates the initial examination. But there is a more fundamental objection too. The court ordered a commission psycholinguistic and philological examination, yet, as the lawyer states, it was in fact conducted exclusively by philologists. The amount of remuneration paid by the claimant's side, in Kobzhanova's view, calls into question both the independence of the examination and the impartiality of those who conducted it.
Questions about impartiality may also arise in our case, especially if one takes into account how exactly the expert report was drafted. One can only hope that the court will assess it on its merits. Although, for a document claiming the status of an expert report, it does not withstand even minimal criticism.
And given the company's ambiguous history and the disputes surrounding its work, we do not rule out that many questions remain beyond this case, and FBRK's editorial team intends to look into them.
