MARCH 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – UK-based InterContinental Hotels Group opened a new five-star hotel in Borjomi, a Georgian resort town. The hotel, branded Crowne Plaza, cost $32m to build. Borjomi is famous for its water. Borjomi fizzy water is one of Georgia’s biggest exports. InterContinental also owns a Holiday Inn hotel in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 9 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s Central Bank kept interest rates steady at 8%, saying that inflation was due to slow and dip into its target zone. Like the rest of the region, Georgia has been increasingly worried about inflation pressure building up in its economy. Prices and salaries have been rising as the value of the lari has fallen. Overall inflation in February was 5.6%.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 7 2016, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom reached an agreement with the government of Georgia to supply gas via Armenia, renewing a deal that has bound the two countries together.
The deal had been in jeopardy after negotiations over additional gas supplies to Georgia from Russia were frozen. But both the Kremlin and Tbilisi see the Armenia gas supply arrangement as a useful dialogue forum and forced it through.
After last-minute negotiations, Kakha Kaladze, Georgia’s minister of energy, confirmed a deal.
“We have reached an agreement with Gazprom, now we just have to sign it,” he told media.
The deal, Mr Kaladze said was similar to the earlier one, with Georgia receiving 10% of the total gas Gazprom sent to Armenia. Georgia, which has been transforming itself into a transit hub for the South Caucasus, had wanted cash instead of gas for the arrangement but Russia refused to budge.
The renewed deal between Georgia and Gazprom will also be a relief to Armenia, which is reliant on supplies from Russia. It has struck deals with Iran but Russia remains its most important partner.
Until the first quarter of 2016, Armenia will continue paying s discounted rate of $165/thousand cubic metres, which Gazprom cut by 12.% last September.
Armenia and Gazprom will have to negotiate a new price for gas for the rest of the year.
Earlier, on March 4, Georgia signed a deal with Azerbaijan to receive an extra 500,000 cubic metres of gas. It had been in negotiations with Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia for months to seal the deal.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are among the three most dependent countries on US aid to pay for their military, the eurasianet.org website reported by quoting a Washington lobby group. In 2014, Georgia received $158m of US military aid, out of a total budget of $387m; Tajikistan received $29m of US aid out of $104m in total and Kyrgyzstan received $90m out of a total military budget of $252m.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 8 2016, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgian PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili said he wanted to write into the national constitution that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, a thinly disguised attempt to woo conservative voters ahead of a parliamentary election in October.
Georgian society is broadly conservative and anti-gay rallies have been strongly supported over the last few years. Gay rights rallies have been attacked.
Mr Kvirikashvili’s Georgian Dream coalition is facing a tough battle to win another term in office.
It has tried to canvass votes from Georgia’s conservative base by looking for support from the influential Georgian Orthodox Church. The Church is anti-gay rights.
“We have a pending initiative that would guarantee the protection of the sacred institution of marriage, via the constitution,” media quoted Mr Kvirikashvili as saying.
This would mean changing the constitution to ensure that marriage is only possible between a man and a woman.
He appeared to be responding to an initiative by Georgian civil rights lawyer Giorgi Tatishvili who has been lobbying for same-sex marriage.
Importantly for Georgia, the EU has highlighted its conservative views over gas rights and other civil issues as a potential stumbling block for its integration into the EU.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Can it really be acceptable for Georgia’s PM to ask for the constitution be altered to block gay marriages? He wants, in effect, to subvert the country’s constitution to match his own beliefs.
This is wrong. It is not up to the PM or the government to tinker with a national constitution when it feels like it.
And it feels even more sullied because this is an election year. The suspicion is that Georgian PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili sees this as a vote winning ploy, a tool to woo Georgia’s important conservative base.
The Georgian Dream coalition, Mr Kvirikashvili’s party, has a reputation for going after the conservative vote and this very much feels as if it is playing up to this reputation. Georgia’s Constitutional Court should stand up to him and tell him to get on with the job of governing the country rather than trying to turn the national constitution into a political football.
For observers, Mr Kvirikashvili’s comments about the constitution should put them on warning about just how vicious this up and coming election campaign is likely to be.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tarkhan Batirashvili, a Georgian citizen who has become one of the most senior ISIS commanders, has either been killed or seriously injured in a US air strike. The US military said that their air-strike had killed Batirashvili, described as IS’s minister of war, although IS later reported that he had been injured. Georgians from its Pankisi Gorge region which borders Chechnya to the north have been joining IS.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
TBILISI, MARCH 6 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — UK-based Noricum Gold will install a second drilling rig at its Kvemo Bolnisi mine in Georgia, it said, to bring forward the start of production to the third quarter of 2016.
Noricum said in a statement it was stepping up its operations in Georgia, after it announced new discoveries last month.
“Having recently raised £1 million which is sufficient to see us through to production in Q3 2016, we intend to firstly produce gold ore from Kvemo Bolnisi where drilling is currently underway, and then at Tsitel Sopeli,” Greg Kuenzel, Noricum’s general director, said in a statement.
Mr Kuenzel also said the company had raised £1m ($1.4m) to bring in the extra equipment and speed up production.
Noricum owns a 50% stake in the Bolnisi gold and copper project, an 860 square km complex of mines in southern Georgia.
It bought the stake for £2.6m ($3.7m) from GMC Investment in July 2015. The remaining 50% belongs to Georgia’s Caucasian Mining Group, owned by Russian entrepreneur Dmitri Troitsky.
Reserves at the Bolnisi project include 980,000 tonnes of copper, 6.6m ounces of gold and 22m ounces of silver.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The economic downturn that has hit Central Asia and the South Caucasus in the past two years has dented people’s purchasing power.
Most people earn salaries in their local currency but these have lost between 50% and 25% of their value in the past months.
This has triggered some social unrest, especially in the South Caucasus. In January, people in Azerbaijan took to the streets to protest against rising food prices and stagnating wages.
The same reasons were voiced by miners in Tkibuli, Georgia, who went on strike for two weeks asking for a 40% increase in salaries. Now reports have emerged from Yerevan where market stall owners briefly scuffled with police over rental prices.
In Central Asia, protests are less frequent and, generally, silenced quickly by the authorities. Last month, however, dozens of Kazakh women banging pots and blowing whistles protested in Almaty about mortgage repayments.
The crisis is starting to bite hard and the people are growing increasingly restless.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 270, published on March 4 2016)
MARCH 2 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Georgian subsidiary of Russia’s VTB Bank will sponsor Georgia’s football team, media reported. The deal highlights, once again, just how improved relations are between the two countries. This sort of deal would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Georgia and Russia fought a brief war over the breakaway state of South Ossetia in 2008.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 270, published on March 4 2016)