Tashkent tries common law without a coastline

FTZ News: Uzbekistan wants a slice of the technology and finance traffic that now stops in Astana. The vehicle is Enterprise Uzbekistan, a free zone for technology firms and financial houses that, according to TechNode, is meant to open in early 2027 and to operate under English common law — the same borrowed toolkit used in Dubai and at the Astana International Financial Centre.

The country has 39m people. Officials list the rest in one breath: some 65% of the population under 35; 140 to 150 higher-education institutions; more than 200,000 technical and engineering graduates a year; internet coverage of 99%; more than 13.5m active digital bank accounts. Fixed investment has run at roughly $30bn in recent years. For 2024 the government advertised an investment programme of more than $52bn.

Residents are promised the usual menu, with a few extras. Full foreign ownership. Fast registration. Zero corporate tax, and, under certain technology schemes, low labour taxes. That is the easy part. Writing a statute is cheaper than building a market.

Startup cheques have fattened, from about $3m raised in 2022 to hundreds of millions of dollars in 2025, on figures circulated with the project. More than 20 venture funds now operate. Kazakhstan got there first. Astana Hub and AIFC have spent years teaching investors the regional drill. Tashkent’s bet is that a younger, larger domestic market plus a familiar court system will peel some of that money south.

What the zone cannot legislate is geography. Uzbekistan is landlocked. The free zones that move bulk cargo sit on water. This project is not that. It is an attempt to sell services, code and fund structures from a double-landlocked republic. Whether firms come for the tax holiday or stay for the courts, the power and the people will be the duller test, and the one that does not show up in a 2027 launch date.