NOV. 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s parliament has approved a new law that will pay out cash rewards to people who give information to the security services which prevents attacks by Islamic extremists, media reported. Kazakhstan has been increasingly worried about the rise in attacks that it attributes to Islamic extremists.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — London-traded KMG EP, a subsidiary of Kazakhstan’s state-owned energy company Kazmunaigas, posted a 47% increase in tenge-denominated revenue in the first nine months of 2016, compared to the same period last year, mostly due to the weaker tenge/US dollar exchange rate. Production fell by 1.2%, mainly because of a 6% drop at its PetroKazakhstan subsidiary, which operates in the central Kyzylorda region.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 14 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenian media reported that following an EU meeting backing a visa liberalisation deal with Georgia and Ukraine, the EU also wanted to start talks with Armenia on scrapping, or relaxing, its visa system. Specifically, Armenpress said that EU officials were waiting for “an opportunity to start negotiations on visa issues with Armenia in a timely period.”
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov hosted Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas for the first time in Ashagabat for talks on bolstering bilateral relations.
Mr Abbas has never been on an official visit to Central Asia before.
After meeting Mr Berdymukhamedov, Mr Abbas opened a new Palestinian embassy. This is thefourth Palestinian embassy in the region after Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.
A Turkmen foreign ministry delegation had travelled to Palestine earlier this year to lay the groundwork for Mr Abbas’ trip to Ashgabat. For Mr Berdymukhamedov, the visit by Mr Abbas was an opportunity to look statesmanlike.
Official media quoted Mr Berdymukhamedov as saying: “Turkmenistan, which implements its foreign policy based on the principles of positive neutrality, is interested in the development of equitable and friendly relations with all world countries, including the Middle East countries and Palestine in particular.”
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — After hovering at around 1.5p for several months, Tethys Petroleum’s share price reached rock bottom at around 0.9p in early November, following increasingly worse news coming from its operations in Kazakhstan.
Its prospective local partner, Olisol, first missed a payment of 9.8m Canadian dollars ($7.3m) and later cancelled Tethys’ gas sales contract in Kazakhstan. It then pulled out completely from its initial offer to become a major shareholder in Tethys.
In addition, Tethys’ local subsidiaries were raided by the Kazakh police and their asset frozen.
The stock price picked up again this week after new potential investors came forward and a Kazakh court dropped the charges against the local subsidiaries. But with much work still to be done before a financing agreement is reached and with a pending legal dispute in Tajikistan, Tethys is far from having found a safe harbour.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Despite slowing domestic production and overall exports, Azerbaijan is stubbornly reaching out to building partnerships with other countries to sell its oil.
Last week, the government and state-owned SOCAR mulled the launch of a pilot programme with Egypt to send 2m barrels of oil to refine in Egyptian plants. In recent weeks, Azerbaijan also planned to send oil to Belarus and Ukraine and to build an oil terminal in Benin, of all places.
Sending oil to its former Soviet sisters Belarus and Ukraine would probably be feasible from a technical point of view, but analysts have shown that Azerbaijan might just not have enough oil to provide for its domestic demand and for the pipeline contracts it already has in place.
SOCAR is sending increasingly less oil through its main export pipelines, posting a 4% decrease via Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, an 11% decrease via Baku-Supsa and an 11% decrease via Baku-Novorossiysk in the first ten months of 2016.
And in the first three quarters of the year, SOCAR posted an 8.7% fall in production due to the drop in the price of oil.
SOCAR’s poor performance in 2016 begs the question of whether the company’s bullish plans to export oil to new destinations and invest in West Africa make economic and financial sense. If there is any sense in this at all, it is difficult to find.
With oil prices still hovering around $50/barrel, SOCAR and its multinational partners in Azerbaijan will maintain low production figures, and this will certainly not boost exports.
The question is, now, who does Azerbaijan turn to to boost its client base.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
ALMATY, NOV. 15 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s Central Bank unveiled a new 10,000 tenge bank note depicting a portrait of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, for the first time, next to an image of Astana, the capital city he built on the Kazakh steppe.
Mr Nazarbayev’s critics immediately criticised him for using the bank notes to embellish what they say is already a flourishing personality cult. Daniyar Akishev, head of the Kazakh Central Bank, though, brushed aside complaints and said the bank note was designed to celebrate 25 years of independence from the Soviet Union.
“All Kazakhstan’s achievements since independence are inextricably linked to the first president of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev,” he said.
Kazakhstan has been producing eye catching banks notes for years. It won the International Banknote Society’s banknote of the year award in 2012, 2013 and 2014. It’s colourful notes have generally included a historical figure one one side and a modern monument on the other, a meshing together of old and new.
Mr Nazarbayev, president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, has worked hard to create a united nation with a Kazakh identity. He has used monuments, slogans and banknotes to achieve this.
Many, though, say that his own personal brand, though, has grown too imposing. In 2011, Almaty city government unveiled a statue outside a park of a suited Mr Nazarbayev sitting on stone.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Baku jailed seven men for fighting for the radical IS group in Syria. Countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus have been fighting to contain a recruitment drive by IS in the region. The men were jailed for between 2-1/2 and 14 years. They had been arrested once they returned home from fighting with IS.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
BISHKEK, NOV. 13 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev appeared to be taking his revenge on opposition groups who quit the government last month over his plans to hold a referendum in December that would change the country’s constitution.
Media reported that he had held a meeting with the head of the National Security Committee, Adil Segizbayev. At the meeting Mr Segizbayev told Mr Atambayev that the government of Belize had passed on information that a handful of Kyrgyz politicians had helped Maxim Bakiyev, the hated son of deposed former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, set up bank accounts in the Central American country.
Mr Segizbayev did not give any names out but in accompanying photos of documents linked to the case, the names of former justice minister Almanbet Shykmamatov, former general prosecutor Aida Salyanova and MP Omurbek Tekebayev are all clearly visible. They form the core of a group of MPs in the Ata Meken party who pulled down Kyrgyzstan’s coalition government last month. They have said the allegations, which haven’t shifted into charges yet, are unfounded.
Mr Atambayev can’t stand for another term as president next year and his rivals worry that he is tinkering with the constitution so that he can take over as an empowered PM once he leaves the presidency.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)
NOV. 14 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s giant Kashagan oil field produced 1.5m barrels of oil in its first month of operations, official media reported. In daily terms, Kashagan produced an average of 52,600 barrels, far below the minimum threshold of 75,000 barrels/day that the consortium said it needs to produce to keep extraction commercially viable. The Kazakh government had previously said it expects Kashagan to reach an average of 90,000 barrels/day before the end of the year.
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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)