OCT. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Senior officials from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan agreed to meet on Nov. 5 in Bishkek to try and resolve the long running issue of border demarcation. Border disputes have strained relations between the two countries since independence.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — TAPI consortium members signed a deal described by the Asian Development Bank as a milestone shareholders’ agreement at a meeting in Ashgabat, an important step towards turning TAPI from a paper project into a real project. The TAPI project aims to build a pipeline to pump Turkmen gas to India, across Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 26 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In September, Kazakhstan increased its gold reserves by 1.5% to around 213 tonnes. Kazakhstan has increased its gold holdings in each of the past 36 months. Gold prices hit a 5-year low in July but have recovered.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen president Kurbabguly Berdymukhamedov ordered an amnesty for more than 1,000 prisoners to mark the 24th anniversary of the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. Mr Berdymukhamedov issues amnesties for inmates to mark public holidays.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The US Federal Reserve Bank’s hinted that interest rates could be increased in December, hitting stock markets worldwide. South Caucasus- and Central Asia-related shares were no exception.
Miners were hit badly. Kyrgyzstan- focused Centerra Gold saw its shares lose over 9% in Toronto this week, closing at 7.36 Canadian dollars on Friday.
KAZ Minerals shares were also down 9%, closing at 116p on Friday.
After announcing it would pay a dividend to its shareholders on Oct. 30, Central Asia Metals reversed a slow start and closed on Friday, with a marginal positive growth, at 163p/share in London.
Oil and gas producers also suffered, despite oil prices gaining 2% this week with Brent crude closing at $49.5/barrel. Kazakhstan-focused Tethys Petroleum and Nostrum Oil & Gas both lost around 10% this week.
After reaching an 8-month high at £21.35/share last Friday, London-listed Bank of Georgia fell by 6.5% to £20.00. Last week its shares rallied after a healthcare group it holds a large stake in announced an IPO price range that valued the company at around $500m.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 24 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A 20-year-old man set fire to himself in the city of Taraz, south Kazakhstan, outside the headquarters of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s political party, a rare suicide by immolation that would have worried the authorities.
A video uploaded onto Youtube showed Yerlan Bektibayev talking to the camera in a central square in Taraz, before pouring lighter fuel over his head, setting himself on fire and then running into the Nur Otan building.
Bektibayev spoke in Kazakh before he set himself alight, explaining that he wanted to kill himself because he couldn’t find a job and that the authorities had bullied him by planting drugs on him and locking him up in prison for a murder that he didn’t commit.
“I cannot find any other way but to die. I do not want to live,” he said on the video.
Kazakhstan has a high rate of youth suicide. The United Nations has said that it is in the top ten countries for suicides of people between the ages of 14 and 29, but, even so, Bektibayev’s choice of setting himself on fire outside the Nur Otan regional headquarters will have alarmed the authorities.
It was an overtly political back- drop to the suicide, with overtones of the immolation in Tunisia in 2010 that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.
Official media largely avoided reporting on the suicide, one TV journalist who works for a state linked channel said he was told not to report on it, and police detained the man who filmed Bektibayev’s immolation.
Social media, though, was full of conflicting opinion. Some said that Bektibayev was to blame for taking his own life, others that society had failed him.
There was no official comment either from Nur Otan or the Taraz regional government.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
ALMATY, OCT. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Central Asian countries fared strikingly well in the latest Doing Business report published by the World Bank, possibly reflecting a drive to attract investment to fight off worsening economic conditions across the region.
The World Bank report singled out Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as among the ten most improved countries in the world. Georgia fell from 15th to 24th place but its overall score was deemed an improvement over last year’s. All other countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus improved their ranking.
According to the World Bank’s assessments. Kazakhstan, 41st in the rankings, made registering a property transfer faster and easier, and Uzbekistan made it easier to start a new business and access credit. It was ranked at 87th, up 54 positions from last year.
In an interview with the Bulletin, Valentina Saltane, Private Sector Development Specialist at the World Bank said Kazakhstan had reformed seven key areas.
“The only area that needs real improvement is cross-border trade,” she said. “Uzbekistan adopted three major reforms, one of which , starting a business, dates back to 2013, but became accessible to private businesses only at the end of 2014.”
Other analysts also said that Kazakhstan had been working hard to speed up various technical reforms.
Alex Nice, Eastern Europe editor at the EIU, said: “Kazakhstan has announced a range of technical reforms, to try to improve the investment climate, in response to the economic slowdown. So it’s not surprising it has moved up the rankings.”
But Mr Nice also sounded a note of caution. He said that developing countries, Kazakhstan included, hire consultants just to advise them on how to move up the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ survey.
“Kazakhstan invests a lot in promoting its image abroad, and may well have hired consultants to advise it on how to achieve a move up the rankings,” Mr Nice continued. “That doesn’t mean that the challenges to doing business in Kazakhstan have fundamentally changed.”
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 26 2015, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — A group of students at the Tajik National University appealed to the US, the EU and Germany to extradite opposition members, raising immediate concerns that the authorities may be coercing sectors of the population to pursue its agenda.
Civic activism is stunted in Tajikistan and this apparent support for the government worried analysts.
A Dushanbe-based analyst who spoke to a Bulletin correspondent said: “The government knows that the Western states will not extradite opposition leaders to Tajikistan. Thus, they control the students and organise similar appeals and demonstrations to show the world that Tajik youth are politically active and there is democracy in Tajikistan.”
The government has stepped up its persecution of opposition groups this year, banning them and arresting activists. It wants opposition leaders extradited from Europe.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s energy minister Kakha Kaladze met with Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller in Milan, their second meeting in a month to discuss Georgian gas supplies from Russia. Georgia needs to increase gas imports to meet demand but buying gas from Russia, they fought a war in 2008, has irritated many people.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kyrgyz Central Bank said after its monthly monetary policy meeting that it was keeping interest rates stable at 10% after pressure on the som currency eased in October. Last month, it raised rates by 2% to halt a slide in the value of the som. It lost 16% of its value in June-Sept.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)