JULY 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani will visit Azerbaijan in August, official media reported, for talks likely to focus on energy and transport issues. The neighbours share a 756km border and jurisdiction over the Caspian Sea. Mr Rouhani last visited Baku in November 2014, before a raft of international sanctions were lifted.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
JULY 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said they would intensify efforts to resolve the stand-off between Azerbaijan and Armenia-backed forces over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The White House said Mr Obama and Mr Putin discussed the South Caucasus during a wide-ranging telephone conversation.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
JULY 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company SOCAR posted a loss of 1.8b manat ($1.2b) in 2015 because of low oil prices, its first loss for over a decade. SOCAR said it will potentially turn a profit this year because of a sharp depreciation of the manat in December 2015, when the Central Bank ditched the peg to the US-dollar.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
JUNE 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The total cost of the new pipelines that will form the so-called Southern Gas Corridor amounts to $6.1b, according to Vagif Aliyev, head of investment at SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company. TANAP, which will run through Turkey, will cost $4.9b, out of which Azerbaijani companies will contribute $820m, according to Mr Aliyev. The Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which will connect Turkey to Italy, has a price tag of $1.2b, and will be completed in the next three years.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Italian authorities accused Luca Volontè, a former MP in Italy’s parliament and also in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of taking a €2.3m ($2.6m) bribe in 2012-14 to vote down a resolution to condemn Azerbaijan for mistreating political prisoners.
This is an important case for Azerbaijan as, if proved, the allegations will once again highlight a culture of corruption in Azerbaijan.
Mr Volontè’s lawyers denied the allegations of bribery and money laundering.
The motion to condemn Azerbaijan’s treatment of 85 prisoners, described as political prisoners, was voted down in Jan. 2013 by PACE representatives 128 to 79.
Now Italian prosecutors said Mr Volontè, who organised the voting down of the motion, took €2.3m from Azerbaijani companies linked to the government. The prosecutors’ investigation said Baktelekom, a Baku-based telecoms company, made 18 payments between 2012 and 2014 to companies linked to Mr Volontè through a number of different banks.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – SOCAR Gas, a Turkey-based subsidiary of Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company, said it sold around 330m cubic metres of gas in Q1 2016 to the Turkish domestic market. The Turkish government decided to buy up to 1.2b cubic metres of SOCAR’s gas this year. Previously, SOCAR gas exports to Turkey were mostly destined to the Petkim petrochemical plant, in which it owns a majority stake.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Azerbaijani and Uzbek weightlifting teams are both facing a ban from competing in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer after their athletes failed a series of drugs test, media reported. Weightlifters from Russia and Kazakhstan have already received a ban.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — An Azerbaijani woman who went into hospital to have a gangrenous leg amputated woke up after the operation to find that the surgeon had cut off the wrong one.
Tarlan Aliyeva, 82, discovered that instead of the inflamed left leg, the right one had been cut off. The surgeon who performed the operation couldn’t be found. He had fled the hospital.
“The doctors did this to me,” a tearful Ms Aliyeva, now a double amputee, was shown on a Youtube video as saying.
“The doctors did that to me because of money. See, they cut it from the root. They are not doctors. If they were, I wouldn’t be in this situation now.”
The case has gripped Azerbaijan with many people reacting with anger at the incompetence of, and corruption in the Azerbaijani medical profession.
“By law, most medical services are free of charge but in reality, you can never get a proper service without bribing,” Ilkin, a 38-year old IT specialist from Baku, told the Conway Bulletin
Reacting to the news, the health ministry has established a special commission to investigate the case jointly with law enforcement authorities.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JULY 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Since mid-2014, a strong US dollar and downward pressures on oil prices have hit economies across Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
Currencies in the region suffered and, despite all the efforts from Central Banks to keep the exchange rate steady by intervening in the market, the fall was inevitable.
Compared to two years ago, all currencies have lost between 15% to 50% of their value. Oil exporting countries (in green in the graph) have fared worse than oil importing countries (pictured in red).
The Kazakh and Azerbaijani Central Banks decided to abandon the currency peg to the US dollar in 2015, causing a plunge in the value of the tenge and the manat. In 2015, these two were among the worst-performing cur- rencies in the world, not just the region.
Oil importers have acted in the opposite direction. In Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, currencies stabilised in the second half of 2015 and Central Banks have tightly controlled exchange rates since.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan may resume its dream of building a mega petrochemical processing complex in an effort to revive its oil and gas sector. This alone is good news for the economy of Azerbaijan, which is poised to see its GDP shrink this year for the first time in two decades.
The intent of SOCAR, the state-owned energy company, is to salvage the project, which it had effectively abandoned in February, after its initial investors had either pulled out or stalled financing.
This is the effect of sustained low oil prices. Besides shying away from upstream exploration and production for costly fields, oil and gas companies have also been forced to rethink their plans for downstream processing facilities.
The project initially included an oil refinery, for a total cost of $16.5b. After scrapping parts of the complex, including the refinery, and downsizing the gas processing facility, the project’s price tag fell to around $4b, a cost that Chinese and Russo- Italian ventures, the new potential investors, now deem feasible.
This is a common problem. Big projects have had to face both the doubts of investors in a low oil price era and the protests of locals, who would rather see resources allocated to combating the enduring crisis.
In January, South Korea’s LG pulled out of a project to build a $4.2b petrochemical plant in Kazakhstan, Russia fled an investment to build a $2b hydropower project in Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan seemed to have abandoned hopes for its project.
As oil prices timidly pick up again, Azerbaijan’s announcement that the project might still see the light could potentially lure investors, who had kept themselves at arm’s length from the rather toxic market it had become in the past two years.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)