SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Almaty and the oil-rich region of Mangistau in the west of the country are the only regions in Kazakhstan receiving a significant inflow of people looking for work, data published on the ranking.kz website reported. The data also showed that most of the people moving to these areas settled in villages rather than cities.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 11 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Rating agency Standard & Poor’s affirmed Kazakhstan’s long-term sovereign debt rating at BBB with a negative outlook, but said weak governance hindered economic performance. It also highlighted limited monetary flexibility and an over-dependence on hydrocarbons as weaknesses.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
ALMATY, SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), has finished upgrade work to two pumping stations that will boost the capacity of its oil pipeline running from west Kazakhstan to Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
Plans to increase the capacity of the Tengiz field near Atyrau have been delayed because of low oil prices, but the gradual expansion of the CPC’s capacity is still important.
Specifically, the latest upgrade work was focused on the pipeline’s two pumping stations in Kazakhstan. The upgrade will boost the flow of oil through the pipeline to 38m tonnes of oil from 35m.
This is a stepping stone towards hitting higher capacity. Nikolai Savin, a deputy vice-president at Russian pipeline company Transneft, explained the consortium’s ambitions.
“The expansion will allow us to increase the volume of transported oil to 67-70m tonnes a year,” local media quoted him as saying. “In the future, the Kazakh fields at Tengiz, Karachaganak and Kashagan will ship around 55m tonnes through CPC.”
CPC, which was established in 2001, is an international pipeline jointly operated by the Russian and Kazakh governments together with national and multinational oil companies led by US’ Chevron. Chevron is also the lead Western partner developing the Tengiz field in the Tengizchevroil consortium (TCO).
The Tengiz field is Kazakhstan’s main oil producer, pumping roughly 27m tonnes of oil each year. This is a third of Kazakhstan’s total oil production. Almost all of the oil produced by Tengiz is exported via CPC.
For years, TCO has been planning to expand production. The project was suspended, though, earlier this year because of the sustained low oil prices, frustrating both investors and the Kazakh government.
According to Sauat Mynbayev, Chairman of Kazmunaigas, Kazakhstan’s state-owned company which holds shares in both CPC and TCO, a final investment decision for Tengiz will be made in Jan. 2016 (Sept. 17). In any case, he said costs had been cut.
“When it was planned, the TCO expansion was quoted at $38b,” Mr Mynbayev told the Interfax news agency. “In the current circumstances, we decided to re-negotiate with all contractors to bring the cost down to around $34b.”
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — LG CNS, a Korea-based global IT service provider and subsidiary of LG, signed an agreement with the Uzbek government to manage its various databases. The parties have created the joint venture, LG CNS Uzbekistan. CEO Kim Daehoon said he wanted to use the joint-venture to pursue more government-orientated projects in Central Asia.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 14 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — Dariga Nazarbayeva, eldest daughter of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, officially quit as a member of parliament to begin her new job as a deputy PM.
Analysts have said that her promotion to government on Sept. 11 may have been the first stage in her journey to take over from her 75-year- old father when retires.
Certainly in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and its financial centre, people interpreted her promotion as the start of dynastic succession.
David Smirnov the owner of a small trading business, said that he thought Ms Nazarbayeva would be a good fit for the top job.
“How could such a man have a bad daughter?” he asked, reflecting the popular support for President Nazarbayev. “So much money has been invested into her. She will be better than any other corrupt official, for sure.”
There has no official commentary from the Presidential Palace regarding Ms Nazarbayeva’s promotion.
Nessibeli Kozhakhmetova, a student, held a similar point of view to Mr Smirnov, the business owner.
“She knows from childhood how her father have worked,” she said. “She is better than someone whom we are not familiar with. She is trustworthy and the most reliable of the options.”
But, importantly, while most people told a Bulletin correspondent that they supported Ms Nazarbayeva’s promotion, there were some divergent opinions.
Aleksey, an advertising manager, was walking down a main street. He stopped and said quietly: “She might be a President but there is no trust in either the Presidency or Dariga.”
And KIMEP economics student Kamila Mukushova said Kazakhstan needed a break from the past and the Nazarbayev family’s grip on power.
“If she will be the President, then everything remains the same in the country,” she said. “We will still be dependent on Russia. We need a more open-minded leader.”
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — Leaders from member states of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) travelled to the Tajik capital for their annual summit, with talk of the threat from Islamic extremism dominating the conference.
Security was tight across Dushanbe. Earlier this month twin attacks on police stations, one in Dushanbe and one in a nearby town, killed nearly two dozen people.
The day after the summit, Tajikistan’s Prosecutor-General accused the opposition Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) of coordinating the attacks (Sept. 17). The authorities have been putting the IRPT under increased pressure over the past year. Linking it to the attacks will now, almost certainly, mean it will be banned.
At the CSTO summit, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon said the number of young Tajiks lured to join IS in Iraq and Syria is increasing.
“The spectre of emergencies and security threats in the region is not diminishing, and could even grow,” he said. This rhetoric, Western analysts have said, suits the security- focused agenda of Central Asia. Many think it is overstated.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said he will help Central Asia strengthen its southern border against any Taliban incursions.
“Here in Tajikistan you are confronted with problems, with encroachments and attempts to rock the situation, and I would like to say that you can always count on our assistance and support,” media quoted Mr Putin as saying.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Armenia detained 50 people during a protest against electricity price rises for businesses. The government backed down after a series of protests in July and said it would subsidise a 17% price rise for residential property but that businesses would have to pay it.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 17 2015, YEREVAN (The Conway Bulletin) — The owner of the Armenian Electric networks company, Russia’s Inter RAO Holding, said it wanted to sell the company to Cyprus-registered Liormand Holdings Limited, triggering more bad feeling towards the company which many people already blame for trying to raise electricity prices.
It’s unclear why RAO would want to sell the Armenian electricity provider to a Cyprus shell company, but Russia does have a background in using this type of scheme to muddy companies’ ownership structures.
Whatever the reasons, the depth of bad feeling towards RAO and confusion about what the deal means for ordinary people was clear on the streets of Yerevan after the announcement.
Anna Khachatryan, a student, said: “We don’t know anything about Liormand Holdings Limited. Is it a good manager?”
Earlier this year thousands of people protested in Yerevan against a proposed 17% price rise, eventually forcing the government to back down and drop most of the plans.
The 1in.am news website wrote in a commentary, that the deal to sell the company was problematic.
‘The sale of the electricity networks does not give the answers of existing important economic and political questions, but, in fact, raises many new questions,” it wrote.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Almaty and the oil-rich region of Mangistau in the west of the country are the only regions in Kazakhstan receiving a significant inflow of people looking for work, data published on the ranking.kz website reported. The data also showed that most of the people moving to these areas settled in villages rather than cities.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Europe’s main election monitoring watchdog, the OSCE’s ODHIR, said it won’t send observers to Azerbaijan’s parliamentary election on Nov. 1 because the Azerbaijani authorities had imposed too many restrictions to make it worthwhile.
The decision by the OSCE not to monitor Azerbaijan’s elections for the first time since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 is a major snub to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and pushes relations between Europe and Azerbaijan to a new low.
At a press conference later in the week with Czech President Milos Zeman who was visiting Baku, Mr Aliyev said: “As you probably know already, cooperation between the European Parliament and the Azerbaijani Parliament has been suspended. This is the result of the dirty campaign being waged against us.”
On Sept. 11, Azerbaijan cancelled an EU delegation visit to Baku and also started the process of pulling out of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, a group that pulls together the European Union and parliaments from the former Soviet Union.
The European Union and Azerbaijan have rowed over Mr Aliyev’s commitment to human rights and free speech. Azerbaijani officials have over the past couple of years detained and imprisoned several prominent human rights campaigners and journalists. Western governments have criticised Azerbaijan for the crackdown while Azerbaijan has said it is the victim of a smear campaign.
But the OSCE’s decision not to monitor Azerbaijan’s election is a watershed decision that pushes the one-time strong Western ally closer towards Russia.
The OSCE, which has never judged an election in Azerbaijan to be either free or fair, said that the conditions that the Azerbaijani authorities had set were just too restrictive to operate effectively.
It had wanted to place 30 long- term and 350 short-term monitors in Azerbaijan for the election but had instead only been allowed six long- term monitors and 125 short-term monitors.
“The restriction on the number of observers taking part would make it impossible for the mission to carry out effective and credible election observation,” the OSCE said in a press release.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)