Category Archives: Uncategorised

Uzbek investigators interview Gulnara Karimova

JAN. 14 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbek prosecutors interviewed Gulnara Karimova at her home in Tashkent, where she is under house arrest, about money laundering, media in Switzerland reported by quoting her lawyer.

This is the first news of Ms Karimova since her father, former Uzbek president Islam Karimov, died in September. In November a report surfaced on opposition news website that she had been poisoned.

The German-language business newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an interview with Ms Karimova’s lawyer, Gregoire Mangeat, who said that he had flown to Tashkent for the interviews held on Dec. 9/10.

He said that she was in good health but had been under pressure from the two state prosecutors to admit to various crimes.

“She was very combative and showed an amazing resistance to the arbitrary situation,” he said. “She bravely endured the confrontation with the three Uzbek prosecutors in military uniform. Twice, however, she burst into tears.”

Mr Mangeat also said that Ms Karimova’s living conditions were inhumane and designed to make her crack.

“My client is held in a small annex of her former house in the centre of Tashkent. The rest of the house has decayed,” her said. “Gulnara Karimova is completely isolated.”

Ms Karimova had been viewed as a potential successor to her father but in February 2014, as prosecutors from Europe and the United States started investigating telecoms companies who had paid her bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars for access to the Uzbek market, she was placed under house arrest. Since then, very little has been heard of the once self-style fashion diva, pop star, roaming ambassador and business leader.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Kazakh police arrest deputy head of pres. administration

ALMATY, JAN. 16 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Kazakhstan continued their purge of top tier officials with the arrest of Baglan Mailybayev, the deputy head of the Presidential Administration, for stealing state secrets.

The arrest of both Mr Mailybayev, 41, who had been deputy head of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration since 2011, and another senior official, follow the arrest of a former head of the National Security Committee on similar charges in December.

A former economy minister and a handful of senior executives at a state-run company have also been arrested for corruption.

Analysts said Mr Nazarbayev may be trying to clean out his administration of people he thought were under-performing.

Dosym Satpayev, director of the Risk Assessment Group, said: “To me, the president is showing frustration with young politicians who have made some serious mistakes in their new positions.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Azerbaijan’s court jails activist

JAN. 16 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Azerbaijan sentenced Elgiz Gahraman, a 31-year-old opposition youth activist, to 5-1/2 years in prison for drug-related offences. The New York- based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that in August 2016 Gahraman had been taken by police to a station in Baku, beaten and forced to sign a confession that he had been carrying heroin and intended to sell it. HRW has accused the Azerbaijani authorities of using bogus charges to imprison people it considers to be troublemakers.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Azerbaijan wants to increase hazelnut growth

JAN. 18 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan wants to nearly triple the size of the area it has growing hazelnuts, media reported quoting officials. Azerbaijan’s economy has shrunk this year because of its over-dependence on oil and gas exports. The government has now said that it wants to diversify the economy and part of this process is to push agriculture.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Azerbaijan wants to buy Russian weapons

JAN. 19 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev said that he wants to buy weapons from Russia. Azerbaijan has become a major weapons buyer over the last few years. It is still officially at war with Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno- Karabakh.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Uzbekistan’s Denis beats Novak

JAN. 19 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan’s Denis Istomin pulled off one of the biggest upsets in international tennis when he beat world no. 2 Novak Djokovic 3-2 in the second round of the Australian Open. Istomin is ranked at 117 in the world.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Turkmen president sacks energy minister

JAN. 13 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov fired Ashirguly Begliyev as head of the state-run Turkmengaz and replaced him with his deputy, Maksat Babayev. No reason was given for the sacking, although Mr Berdymukhamedov likes to rotate his key officials, possibly to ensure that noone builds up enough powerful enough to be able to challenge him.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Georgians doubt authenticity of UNM split

TBILISI, JAN. 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — On the streets of Georgia’s capital city, the UNM’s split was received with scepticism. Georgians are generally weary of the political infighting.

Giorgi, a PhD candidate in Finance, said the split will make the opposition weaker.

“Instead of accepting election results, Saakashvili’s loyalists were planning to declare election results as fraud and fight back from the street,” he said.

“The breakaway section chose the pragmatic way to oppose the ruling party using their parliamentary mandates. However, this move made the opposition weaker.”

Ani, a civil servant, said she doubted the real reason behind the split. “We need to be careful, overall it is still the UNM. Not sure that this is a real split and not a political game again”, she said.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Georgians feel upbeat about future

JAN. 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> There is a new public opinion poll out in Georgia, produced by the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Is this important?

>> In a word – yes. This is one of the rare and generally reliable snapshots of public opinion that is produced in Georgia. Most other polls are biased towards whoever has commissioned it and their political allies.

>> So what did this one tell us?

>> The data is a result of surveys done in November, shortly after a parliamentary election that the Georgian Dream won easily. These results are reflected in the poll data which showed that for the first time since August 2014, more people felt that Georgia was going in the right direction. It was a close run thing, though, with 36% of respondents saying that Georgia wasn’t changing one way or the other, 32% saying it was moving in a positive direction and 27% saying that things were getting worse. This compares well to March 2016 when 40% of the respondents said that Georgia was heading in the wrong direction and only 20% said it was heading in the right direction.

>> And how did this compare to previous poll results?

>> When the Georgian Dream, the coalition funded, by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, first won power in 2012, the poll results for Georgia moving in a positive option were sky-high at around 60% or the high 50s. Things had slipped though.

>> What else does the poll tell us about Georgia?

>> By far the two most important issues for people polled were jobs and rising inflation – 58% of respondents said that jobs were a major concern and 38% said inflation was a major concern. Territorial integrity (27%) was ranked fairly highly but joining NATO (3%) and joining EU (3%), the things that occupy most of the politicians most of the time were towards the bottom of the list.

>> Have people’s priorities changed? Were they different when Georgia’s economy was doing better?

>> Much like the rest of the region, Georgia’s economy has been under immense pressure recently with a recession in Russia and an overly strong US dollar. Over the past few months, Georgia’s lari has plummeted in value and the government has warned of tough times. But, and this is the point, in good times or bad, NDI says that Georgians top five priorities are the same. These are, in order of preference – jobs, inflation, poverty, territorial integrity and pensions. Clearly other than issues over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it’s all about the economy.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)

Kazakhstan delivers wheat to Vietnam

JAN. 19 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan delivered its first batch of wheat to Vietnam via train to a Chinese port and then by cargo ship to Ho Chi Minh city on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, media reported quoting a Kazakh railway executive. The importance of the opening up of this route is the successful use of the Kazakhstan- China railway which can effectively link Kazakhstan to East Asia.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)