SEPT. 14 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The European Broadcasting Union is investigating allegations that Azerbaijan offered bribes to members of this year’s Eurovision jury, media reported. Eurovision is a major TV song contest. Many European countries view it as way of promoting themselves. Azerbaijan won the contest in 2011.
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(News report from Issue No. 152, published on Sept. 18 2013)
SEPT. 3 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Corruption and a poorly educated workforce are the biggest problems to doing business in Kazakhstan, according to executives interviewed in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Index. The index ranked Kazakhstan at 50th position, up one place from last year, out of 148 countries.
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(News report from Issue No. 151, published on Sept. 11 2013)
SEPT. 3 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — President Ilham Aliyev’s team have been highlighting Azerbaijan’s jump up the ranks of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness annual report.
It’s an election year, after all, in Azerbaijan and the WEF report is significant.
In an interview, Elnur Aslanov, head of the Mr Aliyev’s information centre, said Azerbaijan had moved to 39th position in the rankings from 48 last year because of the social and economic policies of the president.
It’s an impressive statistic. Azerbaijan has jumped from 55th position in 2011 and now lies above several EU states.
But it’s also worth looking at the detail.
The reason Azerbaijan ranks so highly in the WEF index is its high score for macroeconomic stability. Azerbaijan’s energy wealth gives it a healthy government debt ratio, a decent government budget balance and strong gross national savings. Azerbaijan also has relatively low inflation, another positive.
The report, though, also details serious shortcomings. These were mainly in the health and education sectors. Notably amongst these was the ranking for school management — 133rd in the world, out of 148 countries.
Significantly, too, of the business executives interviewed for the report nearly a quarter said corruption was still the biggest problem for doing business in Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 151, published on Sept. 11 2013)
AUG. 22 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s four-party governing coalition collapsed, triggering potential long-term political instability. The Ata-Meken and Ar-Namys parties, always tricky partners in the coalition, withdrew their support over corruption allegations against PM Omurbek Babanov and a stalling economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 102, published on Aug. 24 2012)
AUG. 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi acquitted Bacho Akhalaia, Georgia’s former interior minister and an ally of President Mikheil Saakashvili, of abusing his office. Mr Akhalaia still faces two other charges, including instigating a prison mutiny, in one of the most politically sensitive trials in Georgia in recent years.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
AUG. 5 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — So, in the end, he hadn’t gotten very far. After nearly 18 months, police found the 50-year-old Mukhtar Ablyazov hiding in a luxury villa near Cannes on France’s sun drenched southern coast.
Kazakh prosecutors want to charge Ablyazov with trying to overthrow President Nursultan Nazarbayev and planning a series of bomb attacks in Almaty. He had moved to London to escape the Kazakh authorities but has been on the run since fleeing a court that convicted him of perjury. That was back in February 2012 during Ablyazov’s protracted case with BTA Bank, the Kazakh bank he used to be chair, which had accused him of embezzling billions.
Now Kazakhstan needs to work out how to get Ablyazov back to face prosecutors.
The problem for Mr Nazarbayev is that France can’t extradite him directly because Kazakhstan is not a member of the Council of Europe’s Extradition Convention.
This could have been a problem except, conveniently, Ukraine, which is a member of the extradition convention, has issued an extradition request for Ablayzov to face fraud charges. From Kiev, Ablyazov could then be sent on to Kazakhstan.
It promises to be a protracted extradition battle with human rights groups already warning the French government that Ablyazov is unlikely to get a fair hearing.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
CHOLPON ATA/Kyrgyzstan, JULY 29 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A sunny day had turned bad. Rain was sweeping down the valley warning of an impending storm. Just ahead of the storm, a sleek black 4×4 cruised out of the hills bordering Lake Issyk-Kul, the mountain-ringed glacial lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan.
“Do you need a ride?” asked the young Kyrgyz woman in the passenger seat.
Her driver pulled off towards Issyk-Kul, the large clear-blue lake which serves as a summer playground for Kyrgyzstan’s middle class and ruling elite.
The well-dressed lady in the passenger seat picked up the conversation.
“My driver took me to drink the first milk from a horse that’s just had a baby. It’s very good for the skin,” she said.” “I’m staying at Caprice. My husband’s in Bishkek. He’s in the financial police. He is, how do you say, a workaholic?”
Anti-corruption lobby groups accuse Kyrgyzstan’s police of being riddled with bribe-taking officials. Caprice, the hotel where this Kyrgyz lady was staying, lies near the town of Cholpon Ata on the northern shore of Lake Issyk Kul and is Kyrgyzstan’s most luxurious lakeside resort.
The hotel, the 4×4 and the pampered lifestyle spoke of wealth far beyond the reach of the average Kyrgyz civil servant. In a land of shady deals and rampant tax avoidance, a position in the country’s financial watchdog can be lucrative indeed.
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(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)
JULY 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — It’s not over yet but Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has suffered a sharp fall in authority over the past nine months.
Lauded as the leader of the 2003 Rose Revolution that swept away the remains of the old Soviet power structures in Georgia, he has ceded authority across the country since his political party, United National Movement (UNM) lost a parliamentary election in October 2012.
The victors of the parliamentary election, Georgia’s richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his opposition coalition, have gradually taken increased control of local councils as UNM deputies switched sides.
Police have also detained dozens of UNM deputies and business leaders on corruption charges.
Now, Mr Ivanishvili’s supporters have wrenched Tbilisi City Hall from the UNM. On July 20, Georgian media reported that members of the city council had voted out the Tbilisi city council leader after his support gradually drained away in the preceding weeks.
Coming before a presidential election scheduled for Oct. 27, the loss of Tbilisi City Hall will be another blow to Mr Saakashvili’s authority. For foreign business in Georgia, the next few months will be increasingly turbulent.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Kazakhstan have vowed to improve the reputation and effectiveness of the police. They have introduced fitness and aptitude tests and prosecuted various senior police officers for bribe taking.
According to a new survey by the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International (TI), though, they have a long way to go.
In TI’s annual Global Corruption Barometer, more than half of the Kazakh interviewees said they had a paid a bribe to the police in the past year.
Of course there were other services that also rated poorly for bribe taking, including so-called land services, medical services, the judiciary and education. In each case over a quarter of the respondents said they had paid a bribe but illegal payments to the police were noticeably worse.
Perhaps more worrying for the Kazakh authorities was the answer to the question on whether interviewees felt corruption had gotten worse or better over the past year. Nearly 35% answered that corruption in Kazakhstan had worsened in the past 12 months compared with 21% who said it had improved.
For their global corruption barometer, TI surveyed 1,000 people in each of 107 countries between September 2012 and March this year. The results are by no means definitive but, for Kazakhstan at least, they do make for an interesting, and important, snapshot.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijanis, apparently, feel that the government is their best defence against corruption in the public sector.
In a new global corruption survey Transparency International asked roughly 1,000 people in Azerbaijan between September 2012 and March 2013 for their impression of official corruption.
The results were, broadly, positive. Of the interviewees, 41% said that corruption amongst officials was improving in Azerbaijan, 32% said it was roughly staying the same and 27% said it was getting worse.
Georgia, by contrast though, has been the region’s standard bearer for combating corruption and 70% of respondents in the Transparency International survey said that official corruption had decreased.
Back in Azerbaijan, nearly 60% of respondents thought corruption was a serious problem in the public sector but 70% also said government action was reasonably effective in dealing with this vice.
The institutions that respondents thought were most corrupt were the judiciary, medical services and the police. In each case over 40% of respondents thought these institutions were corrupt.
It may just be a snapshot but Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer of Azerbaijan provides an interesting psychological insight.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)