JUNE 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — ALWA, a German plastics manufacturer, bought a 15% stake in Orient Finance Bank, an Uzbekistan-based lender, for 9.3b sum ($3.2m), news agency Trend reported. The bank was able to sell the stake by increasing its capitalisation. This is in line with the government policy of selling off stakes in state-owned or state-participated assets.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government said it will have to recalculate costs for the construction of a petrochemical technopark in a Special Economic Zone near Atyrau, due to the depreciation of the local currency. Nurlan Rakhmetov, managing director at Samruk-Kazyna, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, said costs will rise. As of June 1, the local consortium building the technopark has received 40.7b tenge ($120m) from the state budget.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian PM Dmitri Medvedev said that state-owned gas company Gazprom will invest around $1.5b in Kyrgyzstan’s energy infrastructure and that it will cancel export duty on oil and oil products. Mr Medvedev made the statement while in Bishkek on an official visit. Oil and petroleum products make up 51.9% of Kyrgyz imports from Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — South Korean automaker Hyundai said it has sold 500 Aero City buses to Turkmenistan, for $66m. Hyundai has already sold 700 buses to Turkmenistan over the past seven years. The new buses will mostly service the capital, Ashgabat, during the Asian Indoors Games in 2017.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company SOCAR said its Romanian subsidiary SOCAR Petroleum made a profit in 2015 for the first time since 2011 despite a fall in revenues. SOCAR Petroleum owns several filling stations across Romania. Low oil prices reduced total revenue at SOCAR Petroleum but also gave it a higher profit margin on sales.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company SOCAR said it aims to increase oil and gas production at several offshore fields in the Caspian Sea. The company said it will build nine new platforms to drill 81 wells. CEO Rovnag Abdullayev said a new gas platform in the Guneshli block will be the first to be entirely designed and built by SOCAR.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)f
JUNE 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A new Hyatt hotel will open in mid- June in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, sources told local media. The US-based company had planned to open the new hotel in 2013. The original plan was a $113m investment and completion by early 2015. According to reports, costs have now grown to around $205 and include an investment from the government. The hotel will open just days before a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Tashkent.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmenistan and Afghanistan signed a 10-year agreement for the supply of electricity, a sign of enhanced cross-border cooperation for the two countries’ power sectors. State-owned Turkmenenergo and Afghanistan’s DABS extended the current agreement to the end of 2017 and signed a new agreement, which will last until the end of 2027. Turkmenistan aims to export electricity to Tajikistan and Pakistan via Afghanistan. It holds ambitions to turn itself into a regional power generation hub.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 3 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Armenian Statistics Committee said that average petrol prices fell by 1.8% in April compared to the previous month and by 12% compared to the same period in 2015, a sign that deflation pressures have picked up pace. Prices fell marginally across sectors in Armenia in April.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Canadian miner Centerra Gold said Kyrgyzstan’s Prosecutor has imposed a temporary ban on travel for some unnamed managers at the Centerra-controlled Kumtor Gold Company. The Kyrgyz government has not commented. Last week Centerra said that it had started arbitration proceedings against the Kyrgyz government in Stockholm for hindering its business in various ways.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)