Category Archives: Uncategorised

Azerbaijan’s Central Bank to scrap exchange rate corridor

JAN. 12 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s Central Bank said that it will scrap a 4% exchange rate corridor to allow the manat to float freely. The exchange rate corridor had been designed to keep the manat stable but it has come under increased pressure because of the drop in oil prices and economic problems in Russia. The manat is now trading at around 1.82/$1. In June it traded at 1.49/$1.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Kazakhstan buys Russian choppers

JAN. 11 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will receive an order of four Mi-35M combat helicopters from Russia in 2018, Russian Helicopters said. Kazakhstan has been looking to modernise and improve its military. It has signed various deals with Russia to boost military relations. The Mi-35M is Russia’s most sophisticated combat helicopter and is designed to attack land-based vehicles.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Saakashvili’s United National Movement party splits up in Georgia

TBILISI, JAN. 12 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Three months after a humiliating parliamentary election defeat the once mighty United National Movement party (UNM) appears to be in its final death throes.

Putting an end to months of speculation, 21 MPs from the UNM said that they were breaking away to form a new party.

Gigi Ugulava, the MPs’ unofficial leader, said the UNM was too heavily tarnished by its links to former president Mikheil Saakahsvili.

“One person is responsible for dismantling the party, the person, who established the party,” media quoted him as saying, referring to Mr Saakashvili.

Mr Ugulava is an ex-mayor of Tbilisi. He was only released from prison a week earlier, where he had been serving a sentence for bribe-taking.

At a parliamentary election, UNM won just 27 seats of 150 seats, down from 65 seats in the 2012 election. Its great rivals, the Georgian Dream won 115 seats, up from 85.

Mr Saakashvili, Georgian president from 2004 until 2013 who counted George W. Bush as a friend, has been living in exile since leaving office in 2013. He had been hoping that a UNM victory at the election would allow him to return to Georgia.

He responded to the breakup of the party from his base in Ukraine in his usual bombastic fashion.

“Everyone saw the amount of defectors today and everyone will see the strength and the amount of the United National Movement at its January 20 congress,” he said on Facebook.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Kazakh editor pleads guilty to extortion

JAN. 11 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Bigeldy Gabdullin, a Kazakh newspaper editor, pleaded guilty to trying to extort payments from government officials by threatening to publish negative articles about them. He was arrested in November and his trial is due to begin on Jan. 17. In the early 2000s, Mr Gabdullin had been a critic of the government but since the mid-2000s he has edited the pro-government Central Asia Monitor newspaper.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Visitor numbers grow in Georgia

JAN. 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Just over 6.3m people visited Georgia in 2016, the country’s statistics service said, an increase of 7.6% from 2015. The data doesn’t differentiate between tourists and business visitors. The largest number of visitors were from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Russia. EU citizens made 263,000 trips, up from 241,000. A 45 day visa-free regime for Iranians also boosted numbers to 148,000 visits up from 25,000 visits in 2015.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Police in Azerbaijan detain family of exiled anti- government rapper and independent blogger

JAN. 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The police in Azerbaijan allegedly breifly detained and threatened four family members of exiled rapper Jamal Ali in retaliation for his new song dedicated to two imprisoned anti-government activists.

Mr Ali’s rap, released on Dec. 31 and watched over 100,000 times on YouTube, criticised president Ilham Aliyev.

“The police told my mum ‘We cannot arrest your son, so we arrested you’. They also told her I had to take down my video from YouTube,” he wrote, adding that he would only take the rap down when Mr Aliyev had resigned.

Three days later, on Jan. 9, Mehman Huseynov a popular Azerbaijani blogger, who has documented what he has described as human rights infringements in Baku, said that he was taken to a police station by security officers and roughed up.

Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said that Huseynov had been abducted by police, beaten and forced into a confession that he had been fighting.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Uzbekistan buys Dreamliners

JAN. 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan Airways has bought four more Boeing 787-800 Dreamliner aircrafts for an undisclosed amount to be delivered in 2019 and 2020, media reported. The Dreamliner is a long-haul aircraft that came into production 10 years ago. Uzbekistan has been trying to boost its airline and market itself as a stopover between the West and East Asia.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Kazakh registration rules frustrate people

ALMATY, JAN. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh authorities imposed new migration rules which will force people to register with a local unit of the interior ministry every time they switch jobs or travel somewhere, even if it is just for a few days.

The interior ministry has said the new rules are needed to help fight terrorism but the hundreds of people queuing at centres across the country said that the new plans were just adding cost and wasting time.

Centres dealing with the flow of people trying to register under the new rules have had their opening times extended by an hour and are now also open on Sundays.

Saltanat, 25, a small business owner in Almaty said the authorities hadn’t communicated their plan properly.

“This is a very flawed law and I think that those who passed it don’t fully understand it themselves,” she said. “I have to work eight hours a day and I don’t know how am I going to register given huge lines in Public Service Centres.”

The Kazakh authorities want to clampdown on terrorism and some people welcomed the new rules.

“In my mind, authorities are attempting to solve two problems at once. Reduce the crime rate in big cities and control the unstoppable migration of people from rural areas to the cities like Almaty,” said Shaken, 49.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

House prices fall in Kazakhstan

JAN. 9 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The price of new housing in Kazakhstan, considered a key economic indicator, was 3.6% lower in December 2016 than 12 months earlier, media reported quoting the economy ministry. This is still slower than the fall in older houses which analysts said was down by up to 15% in 2016. Kazakhstan’s economy has been hit by a collapse in oil prices and the fall in the value of the tenge.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)

Kapparova quits KazInvestBank

JAN. 11 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Gahaur Kapparova, the widow of the former head of Kazatomprom, the Kazakh nuclear agency, has quit her 10% stake in KazInvestBank, less than two weeks after the Central Bank pulled its banking licence. According to data filed at the Kazakh Stock Exchange, the biggest shareholder in KazInvestBank is now Nurzhan Dzhanabekov, the bank’s CEO, with 15.3%. Ms Kapparova’s husband, Nurlan Kapparov, died from a heart attack during a business trip to China in 2015.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)