According to the FIDE Rules, the President and his Deputy President run for election on a common list. Therefore, Timur Turlov has joined the team of the current FIDE President, Arkadiy Dvorkovich, who will also participate in the upcoming election campaign.
Timur Turlov headed the Kazakhstan Chess Federation in 2023. Today, Kazakhstan has one of the strongest colt teams and one of the best women’s teams. Medal counts are steadily growing: in 2025 alone, Kazakhstani chess players won 162 awards at international tournaments, 64 of which were gold. More than 1,500 schools and over 60,000 students across Kazakhstan are participating in a special chess training program.
“The results achieved over these 3.5 years have convinced me of a simple thing: the approach we’re using in Kazakhstan works, and it can be scaled up much more broadly, to the level of world chess”, – Timur Turlov wrote on his social media.
In April of this year, Freedom Holding Corp. announced acquisition of ChessBase, one of the world’s oldest and largest services specializing in chess software, analytics, and data. Expected investments in the project’s development will amount to approximately €5 million.
Timur Turlov is the Kazakhstani businessman, the founder and the majority shareholder of the international fintech company, Freedom Holding Corp. The group is headquartered in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and New York, USA. The company’s revenue for the 2026 fiscal year was $2.2 billion. Since listing on Nasdaq in 2019, this figure has grown 26-fold. The company’s market capitalization exceeds $8 billion, and Forbes estimates Turlov’s private fortune at $5.5 billion.
The Freedom ecosystem includes banking divisions in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, a brokerage business with nearly 1 million clients across all jurisdictions, insurance companies, marketplaces, and Lifestyle services. Timur Turlov’s Freedom Holding Corp. operates in more than 20 countries. In addition to Kazakhstan and the United States, the group serves clients in the European Union and the Middle East. The Freedom ecosystem has a total of 14 million clients. This spring, the company announced agreements to acquire Turkish Bank A.Åž., the Turkish bank, and submitting documents to obtain a brokerage license in this country.
In June, Freedom Holding Corp. applied for a banking license in France. As part of its European expansion, the holding company plans to invest €500 million in creating a digital bank and developing a local infrastructure.