APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tojik Sodirot Bonk, one of the biggest banks in Tajikistan, is forcing staff to take unpaid leave, media reported, an indication of the serious impact of an economic downturn. There were reports earlier this year of runs on banks. Tajikistan has been hit hard by a recession in Russia which has dried up remittance flows.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Gazprom Armenia, the Russian owned gas distributor, said it will apply to the country’s regulator to lower consumer prices by 6%. The discount will be limited to households that consume 10,000 cubic metres of gas a year, the company said. Earlier this month, Gazprom said it would give the Armenian government a 9% discount on the gas it supplies.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Toronto-listed miner Centerra Gold said that Kyrgyz police have raided the Bishkek offices of its wholly owned Kumtor Gold Company, reigniting a vicious row that has involved the miner and the government. For years, Centerra and the government have rowed about ownership of the Kumtor gold mine. Kumtor accounts for around 7% of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP and is the country’s largest industrial asset.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Tajik government passed a law that forces NGOs to report to the authorities any grants received in the past 10 days. In mid- 2015, Tajikistan amended its law on NGOs with the stated objective of tracking funding for potential terrorist activity. There has been a general move in Central Asia towards tightening regulations of funding for NGOs. The authorities have said that is to crackdown on extremists and criminals, but others have said this is aimed at reducing foreign influence over NGOs and curtailing their independence.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US named Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, as the beneficiary of bribes worth $550m taken between 2007 and 2013 from telecoms companies wanting access to the Uzbek market.
This was the first time that Ms Karimova, 43, has been named in connection with the corruption case since news of the deals became public three years ago.
It’s also a reminder of just how tightly President Karimov and his family ran Uzbekistan, seemingly viewing it as their personal fiefdom, and how telecoms companies, from Sweden’s TeliaSonera to US-listed VimpelCom, had to bribe their way into the market of 30m people.
TeliaSonera rebranded as Telia Company earlier this month. Both Telia and VimpelCom are the subject of investigations in the corruption cases. Telia is also trying to sell off its subsidiaries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
A Bloomberg News report from New York said that prosecutors had named Ms Karimova after previous requests to recover cash, which they said had been laundered, were ignored.
“Prosecutors made the request in a letter to a Manhattan federal court judge on Thursday (April 21), saying Karimova and the group failed to respond to a civil forfeiture complaint against three bank accounts,” Bloomberg reported.
Ms Karimova had previously only been referred to, rather obliquely, as: “Government Official A, a close relative of a high-ranking Uzbek government official.”
Being named in the reports will bring further international notoriety on Ms Karimova.
She had once been spoken of as a future leader of Uzbekistan, a label she appeared to wear lightly while she produced pop videos, hosted fashion shows and concocted her own perfume range.
Now Ms Karimova has disappeared from public sight, having been placed under house arrest in Tashkent two years ago.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon said that modernisation work at the Nurek hydropower plant needed an additional 4.7b somoni (around $600 million). The government has worked on the modernisation of the plant with the World Bank. The Nurek station has a total capacity of 3,000 MW and produces over 70% of Tajikistan’s electricity.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Amonullo Sadulloyev, the brother- in-law of Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon, was made chief of Southern Electric Networks, a power distribution company based in Kurgan-Tube. Last August, Mr Sadulloyev was sacked as the deputy director at the national power distributor Barqi Tojik. Transparency activists have criticised Tajikistan for its perceived nepotism.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A stinky lake is apparently keeping Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev awake at night.
This week, he reprimanded the mayor of Astana, Adilbek Dzhaksybekov for his inability to get rid of a stench emanating from the Taldykol lake, just behind Nazarbayev University’s shiny new buildings.
Everything in Astana must be pristine, all the more because next year Kazakhstan’s capital will host EXPO-2017, an occasion for Mr Nazarbayev to project a prosperous image for his country.
If Mr Dzhaksybekov cannot clean up the air near Taldykol, Mr Nazarbayev threatened to have him transferred in a yurt on the lakeshore.
Mr Nazarbayev has grown increasingly wary of excessive government spending, as the regional economic downturn hit the country hard. For the first time in more than a decade, the country’s GDP might shrink in 2016.
Public shaming is not unusual in Kazakhstan and state television is not adverse to showing Mr Nazarbayev bashing sheepish officials, who, terrified, have to listen to the veteran leader’s rantings.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Oil exports from Azerbaijan’s state- owned energy company SOCAR shrank by 10% in 2015 compared to 2014. In 2015, SOCAR exported 22.1m tonnes of oil, out of total country exports of 35.2m tonnes. Its share of Azerbaijan’s oil exports also fell from 70% in 2014 to 63% last year.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Once feted as a future Uzbek leader, and with an obvious taste for the limelight, Gulnara Karimova’s fall from grace has been sharp.
At the peak of her power and influence, she ran Uzbekistan’s top industrial conglomerate, Zeromax, owned the country’s biggest football team and was the Uzbek envoy to the United Nations in Geneva.
In her spare time, Ms Karimova designed clothes, developed perfume ranges for her own fashion label and produced whimsical music videos which starred, as a backing singer, French actor Gerard Depardieu, now more famous for drunken brawls on aeroplanes and for embracing former Soviet leaders shunned by the West.
But, despite the glamour, Googoosha, a nickname given to Ms Karimova by her father and mockingly adopted by ordinary Uzbeks, was described as the most hated person in the country.
A 2005 cable from the US embassy in Tashkent said that ordinary Uzbeks considered Ms Karimova to be “greedy and power hungry.”
“She remains the single most hated person in the country,” the author of the cable, then-ambassador Jon Purnell, wrote.
Since 2014, though, she has disappeared from public view, apparently incarcerated in a house in Tashkent. An international corruption scandal focused on payments made by mobile phone companies for access to Uzbekistan and an internal power struggle appear to have undermined Ms Karimova.
Pictures of her pleading with her guards and looking thin and drawn leaked out about a year ago, but little else has been seen or heard. Few ordinary Uzbeks care, though.
Eric McGlinchey, a professor at George Mason University, said that her public opulence had been the real reason behind her downfall.
“She wasn’t a quiet crook. She pursued a grotesquely extravagant lifestyle and that made her detested among both the ruling class and ordinary Uzbeks,” he said.
“Were she merely a quiet crook, revelations of hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore accounts could be overlooked.”
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)