TASHKENT (RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service) — Mirodil Jalolov, the jailed former CEO of the Uzbek firm Zeromax, has been released from a detention centre in Tashkent after spending more than eight years in custody without a trial.

Mirodil Jalolov

Jalolov’s wife Fotima Jalolova told RFE/RL that her husband was released on January 8 on the order of a Tashkent court after a hearing that lasted one day.

The court ruled that Jalolov was guilty of embezzlement and forgery. He was ordered to pay a fine of about $2,000.

Jalolov was detained in 2010 for questioning after Uzbek authorities shut down Zeromax, a firm that was registered in Switzerland in 2005 when it reportedly was taken over by the late President Islam Karimov’s daughter, Gulnara Karimova.

The firm initially had been set up in 1999 in the United States, reportedly by associates of Gafur Rakhimov — the controversial president of the International Boxing Association (AIBA) who is blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department as “one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals” and an alleged key figure in the global heroin trade.