MARCH 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s Appeal Court cut a jail sentence handed down to former PM Serik Akhmetov, jailed last year for corruption, to eight years from10 years. Akhmetov was jailed last year in a high-profile case. He was PM for 18 months until April 2014 and was then defence minister. The case drew attention to Kazakhstan’s reputation for corruption.
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(News report from Issue No. 272, published on March 18 2016)
MARCH 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenia’s overall electricity production was 5.2% higher in January compared to January 2015, mostly due to the sharp increase in hydropower generation.
While traditional sources of power such as thermal and nuclear increased only marginally, production from hydropower and small hydropower stations grew by 23.7%, according to Armenia’s Statistics Committee.
Small hydroelectric plants, in particular, have heavily increased their contribution to Armenia’s total power output.
Small hydropower plants are defined in Armenia as power plants that generate up to 30 MW. In Armenia there are now 173 small hydropower plants, more than twice as many as there were in 2010 and six times more than in 1991. Today, they account for around 9% of the country’s power generation.
Individual entrepreneurs, including many people linked to government officials and ministers, have driven the rise in these small hydro- power stations, building along rivers and generating power which links straight into the national grid.
But while the government has welcomed the rise in small hydro- power stations, anti-corruption campaigners have linked them to money laundering and corruption and environmentalists have said that they are damaging rivers’ eco-systems and creating eye-sores.
“Critics say the plants already in operation are sucking up most of the water in the river system, destroying traditional trout fisheries and depriving area residents of reliable access to water,” Kristine Aghalaryan said in report in the Hetq newspaper.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Italian prosecutors charged Dinamo, an energy consortium registered near Milan, with paying millions of euros in bribes to Kazakh officials for a contract to service the giant Kashagan oil field.
The bribes, the prosecutors said, are part of a deep-rooted system of corruption used to win contracts in the oil services sector around the world. So far, ENI, Italy’s biggest energy firm, has not been involved in the legal proceedings, but analysts argue that the investigation might inevitably reach the former operator of Kashagan.
ENI holds a 16.8% stake in the Kashagan consortium of which Kazmunaigas, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, CNPC and Inpex are all part.
Italy is one of Kazakhstan’s main trade partners. Kashagan is supposed to start commercial oil production later this year after a three year delay.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Norway’s parliament challenged the Tajik government to reveal exactly who was the real beneficiary behind the TALCO aluminium smelter company. Newspaper reports have focused on potential corruption at the plant and in deals that included Norway’s part-state owned Norsk Hydro.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A parliamentary committee in Norway opened an investigation into alleged corruption by state-owned aluminium producer Norsk Hydro in Tajikistan, the second probe in the last six months into bribery against a Norwegian government-owned company working in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
Specifically, the Norwegian parliament now wants to see Hydro’s contract with Tajikistan’s state-owned aluminium plant TALCO. It challenged the notoriously secretive TALCO, the biggest industrial asset in Tajikistan, to reveal who its true beneficial owners are. Many believe that, via a network of offshore companies, it is Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon and his family.
Media quoted Jette Christensen, MP and a member of the committee, as saying: “We and the minister must find out who are the hidden owners, therefore this is an order to both Hydro and the minister. We also believe that we must see the entire contract Hydro had with TALCO Management Ltd.”
TALCO Management Ltd., the shell company for TALCO, is registered in the British Virgin Islands and is seen by many observers as a safe haven for corrupt practices.
Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv wrote an in-depth story about the Hydro-TALCO case in mid- February, an article that appears to have triggered parliament’s renewed interest deals between the two companies between 1993 and 2003.
Hydro have denied the allegations and sent a 17-page reply to parliament. “There are no indications of Hydro having acted in violation of applicable laws, internal rules or guidelines,” Dag Mejdell, Hydro’s chairman, said in the statement.
“The company has zero tolerance towards corruption.”
The Norwegian government owns a 34.3% stake in Norsk Hydro.
In November 2015, Norway’s minister of industry sacked Svein Aaser, chairman of Telenor, a telecoms company under investigation for corruption in Uzbekistan in 2007/8 linked to payments for 3G licences. The investigation is ongoing.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
FEB. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russian telecoms operator VimpelCom said it would pay a $795m settlement to resolve US and Dutch lawsuits focused on bribes it paid to top Uzbek officials in the late 2000s, a deal that highlights corruption by foreign telecoms companies in Uzbekistan.
The court settlement against VimpelCom is one of the largest settlements linked to bribery in US corporate history.
VimpelCom is majority owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman but is headquatered in Amsterdam and is also listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Telenor, the Norwegian telecoms company, also owns a 33% stake in VimpelCom.
Officials in the US and the Netherlands opened investigations against VimpelCom in 2014 for bribing Uzbek public officials to obtain a licence. The description of the corrupt official in the US court’s proceedings fits the profile of Gulnara Karimova, the president’s daughter, although her name is not explicitly mentioned.
The court said that, between 2006 and 2012, Unitel, VimpelCom’s subsidiary in Uzbekistan, paid $114m in bribes to operate in the country and to obtain 3G and 4G licences.
Two days before the settlement, VimpelCom released a report where it effectively admitted its guilt.
VimpelCom said it “would, among other things, acknowledge certain violations of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and relevant Dutch laws and pay fines.”
Following the settlement Jean Yves Charlier, the VipelCom CEO, said: “The wrongdoing, which we deeply regret, is unacceptable.”
VimpelCom uses the Beeline brand. In Central Asia, Beeline also operates in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
But VimpelCom is not alone in bribing its way into Uzbekistan’s mobile network. Swedish-Finnish telecoms company TeliaSonera has also admitted bribe paying in 2008 for access to Uzbekistan’s market.
For Uzbekistan, the telecoms corruption cases have confirmed widely perceived views that bribe paying is rampant and that, previously, major companies wanting to do business there had to deal with Ms Karimova. She was once thought of as a future president but has been under house arrest in Tashkent for two years.
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(News report from Issue No. 268, published on Feb. 19 2016)
FEB. 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Around a dozen protesters in Astana demanded the release from prison of Kazakhstan’s former PM Serik Akhmetov, who is serving a 10-year sentence for corruption. Protests in Kazakhstan, especially supporting former high-ranking officials who have been imprisoned for corruption, are rare.
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(News report from Issue No. 268, published on Feb. 19 2016)
FEB. 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov sacked deputy PM Palvan Taganov for “weakening discipline and order”. The official explanation is code for corruption allegations. Mr Taganov had served in his post for two years and also headed the official commodity exchange. According to unconfirmed reports, Mr Taganov has been arrested.
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(News report from Issue No. 267, published on Feb. 12 2016)
FEB. 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s ministry of defence said it was investigating allegations that some Georgian soldiers on assignment in the Central African Republic were part of a rouge group of peacekeepers who abused children and raped women. The UN said it had opened an investigation after allegations were levied at peacekeepers. Georgia sent 150 soldiers on an EU-led mission to the Central African Republic between Feb. 2014 and March 2015.
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(News report from Issue No. 266, published on Feb. 5 2016)
JAN. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – At a speech at his swearing-in ceremony as the new president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Pedro Agramunt, a Spanish parliamentarian, described Gigi Ugulava, the former mayor of Tbilisi, as a “political prisoner”. The description will irritate the current Georgian government. Ugulava was imprisoned in 2015 for 4-1/2 years for misspending public money, charges he has said are politically motivated.
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(News report from Issue No. 265, published on Jan. 29 2016)