AUG. 31 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenia’s GDP grew by 4.4% in H1 2015, media quoted PM Hovik Abrahamyan as saying. This is better than analysts had predicted. Mr Abrahamyan said an increase in agriculture exports had helped offset a drop in economic conditions triggered by the fall in the dram currency.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Norwegian oil and gas company, Statoil, is reducing its staff at its office in Azerbaijan, an anonymous employee was quoted as saying. “From 40 employees, the company now has around 10,” the source told the Azeri Press Agency. In 2014, Statoil sold its 15.5% share in the offshore gas field Shah Deniz and its pipeline assets to Malaysian Petronas.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
AUG. 31 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Korean Water Resource Corporation (K-Water) awarded Italian engineering group Salini Impregilo a contract worth $575m to build the Nenskra hydroelectric power plant (HPP) in the Svaneti region of northwest Georgia.
K-Water, in partnership with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the Korean Exim Bank, are developing the 280MW project which will have an overall cost of around $1b.
Salini Impregilo has already worked in Georgia on various projects, including the construction of a new motorway.
“The work will have to be completed in 62 months from the signing of the contract,” Salini Impregilo said in a statement.
“The Project will be composed of a main dam, a weir on the Nakra river, a transfer tunnel, a headrace tunnel to the powerhouse and the actual open-air powerhouse with four vertical-axis Pelton turbines.”
The Nenskra HPP project has been talked of for a few years. The Chinese Sinohydro had been selected to develop a 210MW project in 2012, only to withdraw later. Both the cost and the capacity of the HPP have been increased since 2012.
Irakli Kovzanadze, CEO of Partnership Fund, which controls stakes in major Georgian infrastructure projects for the state, underlined the importance of the project for Georgia.
“This hydropower plant will be the largest one in Georgia since the country’s independence,” Georgian media quoted him as saying.
Georgia produces three-quarters of its electricity from hydroelectric plants, although it still imports more than it produces.
One of the key strategic aims of the Nenskra HPP is to help Georgia reduce its energy dependence on Russia, which supplies it with most of its gas.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Le Méridien, a brand of the US-based Starwood Hotels, said it will open a new hotel in Batumi, on the Georgian Black Sea coast, in 2018. Starwood chose a section of the landmark Batumi Towers to host its hotel. The Batumi Towers, was a pet project of former president Mikheil Saakashvili but has been empty since it was built in 2012.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russian car manufacturer AvtoVAZ said it would increase prices in the Kazakh market by 3%. “The new pricing policy is due to changing macroeconomic factors and increased competition,” a company official told kapital.kz. Kazakhstan has devalued its currency and inflation is rising. This is the fourth price rise in 2015.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
AUG. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Increasingly concerned about radicalising influences, Kazakhstan’s prosecutor-general said it was banning 700 websites and 21 religious organisation. Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states are worried about extremists linked to the IS group recruiting disenfranchised young men to their causes. Free speech activists have accused the government of using these concerns as a pretext for clamping down on media.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Umut Shayakhmetova, chairman of Halyk Bank, said the devaluation of the tenge last month would hit businesses hard and that the impact would be heavier than a devaluation in 2014. “It will affect the economy. Our clients will experience a drop in sales,” media quoted her as saying at a press conference.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – From Sept.1 government salaries and pensions in Uzbekistan increased by 10%, media reported, another indication that inflation is accelerating across the region.
Uzbek president Islam Karimov ordered 26, ostentatiously to improve the quality of life for ordinary people but in reality to keep up with price inflation in basic foodstuffs, utilities and petrol.
Like the rest of the region, Uzbekistan’s currency has fallen sharply in value and remittance from Russia have roughly halved.
The Uzbek government usually increases salaries and pensions once or twice a year. The previous salary increase of 12% came in December 2014.
As well as boosting salaries, the government is also increasing import duties on major staples ranging from meat and poultry, to dairy and fruits by around 30%. University tuition fees have risen by 15%. Part of the thinking behind the increase in duties is to ring-fence agricultural production in Uzbekistan during the economic downturn.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Baku sentenced investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova to 7-1/2 years in prison for various financial crimes, triggering heavy criticism from the West of Azerbaijan’s human rights record and commitment to free speech.
Ismayilova joins a growing list of human rights activists, journalists and opposition supporters who have been sent to prison by the authorities in Azerbaijan over the past few years.
Opponents of President Ilham Aliyev have accused him of effectively purging Azerbaijan of dissidents.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch said: “The outrageous verdict against Khadija Ismayilova shows the Azerbaijani authorities’ willingness to subvert the law to exact revenge against critics.”
This opinion was backed up by other human rights and media agencies as well as the EU, the British government and the United States.
Azerbaijan retorts that the West is trying to organise a coup.
Ismayilova was jailed for tax evasion, embezzlement and abuse of power, almost an exact mirror of the type of wrong-doings she has investigated in various government agencies, and even the presidential family, over the past few years.
Mr Roth of Human Rights Watch said independent observers had been unable to access the courtroom because pro-government supporters had taken all the seating.
“The government gets away with things like this because Azerbaijan has paid no price for throwing one dissident, one human rights activists after another into prison,” he said.
Part of the dilemma for Europe is that it wants to reduce its gas dependency on Russia. This means finding an alternative source of gas and this source of gas is Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijani government appears to have gambled that Europe won’t stop building pipelines and negotiating gas contracts despite grumbling about its crackdown on dissidents.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
SEPT. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan Airways closed its office in Kiev, due to delays in reinstating flights between the Ukrainian capital and Tashkent. “Our airline has been expecting to receive permission from the Ukrainian aviation authorities since May,” Alisher Abdualiyev, the Uzbek ambassador to Ukraine, told the kapital.ua website. In May 2015, flights between Tashkent and Kiev were discontinued due to the absence of an agreement between the two countries.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)