Tag Archives: government

Georgian government cuts national budget

JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – TBILISI – Georgia’s finance ministry said it will cut the national budget by 140m lari ($53m), 1.75% of the original budget, because of an economic slowdown.

Cuts will be made across government but hardest hit will be education, agriculture and the interior ministry.

PM Irakli Garibashvili said the government should have revised its budget earlier.

“Almost all the countries in the region had to revise their budgets because of the crisis,” he told parliament.

The government said that Georgia’s economy would grow by around 2% this year, far below the 5% initially anticipated.

A downturn in Russia’s economy and a slump in energy prices has hit Georgia hard. It is unclear if these cuts will be enough or more will follow.

The popularity of the ruling Georgian Dream has been slip- ping, in part because of the economic slowdown.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)

Kazakhstan pays German politicians

JUNE 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan is paying former senior German politicians large salaries to whitewash its reputation in Europe, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported quoting emails it has seen from an Austria-based law firm. The magazine named former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former president Horst Koehler and former interior minister Otto Schily.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)

Azerbaijani activist flees to Switzerland

JUNE 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Swiss embassy in Baku organised for Emin Huseynov, an Azerbaijani dissident and critic of President Ilham Aliyev’s administration, to fly out to Switzerland with Swiss foreign minister Didier Burkhalter. Mr Huseynov had been sheltering in the Swiss embassy since mid-August when police had tried to arrest him on drug-related charges.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)

Majoritarians to stay in Georgian parliament

JUNE 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream coalition said it won’t scrap the MPs elected via a first- past-the-post system for the 2016 parliamentary election. Last month the Constitutional Court said it backed reforming the voting system to make it fairer.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)

New labour laws anger Kazakh workers’ unions

JUNE 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh government presented new rules for workers which reduces their rights and forces unions to re-register with a government institution, a move which could damage relations between labour groups and companies.

Tamara Duysenova, the minister for health and social development, presented the bill at the National Congress of Trade Unions in Astana.

“The new provisions are in line with the spirit of the Law On Trade Unions approved last year,” she said.

The Unions disagree. Lyudmila Ekzarkhova, an official at the Confederation of Free Trade Unions, said: “These measures would put independent unions under the thumb of a government- appointed body.”

Opposition groups have criticised the measures which free employers from paying overtime work and cut benefits for injured workers.

The new law will also force independent trade unions to re-register under the state- controlled Federation of Trade Unions. Strikes called by unregistered trade unions will be illegal.

Relations between big companies and workers in Kazakhstan are already delicate.

Ever since oil workers went on strike in the town of Zhanaozen in the west of the country in 2011, a strike which triggered a riot and then a street battle with police that killed at least 15 people, workers’ rights in Kazakhstan have been strained.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)

Azerbaijani electricity may rise

JUNE 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Officials in Azerbaijan are considering increasing the electricity tariff to a more equitable market rate, media reported. Electricity across the former Soviet Union is generally subsidised although governments are reducing this, much to the irritation of ordinary people.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)

Azerbaijan orders OSCE to close office in Baku

JUNE 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Azerbaijan ordered the OSCE to close its office in Baku and barred Amnesty from visiting the city, triggering fresh criticism of its civil rights record shortly before President Ilham Aliyev opens the inaugural European Games.

Azerbaijan and the West have been locked in an acrimonious row over civil rights which has threatened to damage their fragile relationship.

Now the OSCE, as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe is more commonly known, said that the Azerbaijani authorities had ordered it to close its Baku office.

“The government of Azerbaijan has notified the OSCE of its intention to close the organisation’s office in Baku,” AFP quoted the spokesman for the OSCE Baku office, Rashad Huseynov, as saying.

This takes relations between Europe and Azerbaijan to a new low. Among other roles, the OSCE is Europe’s democracy watchdog. It evaluates elections against European democratic standards.

Azerbaijan already has form, though. At the end of last year it raided and closed the office of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

London-based Amnesty also said it had cancelled a trip to Baku after the Azerbaijani authorities said that its delegation was not welcome to visit until after the European Games.

It’s a delicate relationship between Europe and Azerbaijan. While it may not like Azerbaijan’s attitude towards dissenters, Europe wants to buy its gas.

For Mr Aliyev, these are frustrating times.

He wants to increase the profile of Azerbaijan through sport and had hoped that the European Games, set to open on June 12, would act as the perfect launch.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)

Armenia’s CBank shifts research unit to spa town

DILIJAN/Armenia, JUNE 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Once best known as a spa resort in the north-eastern mountains of Armenia, for the past couple of years Dilijan has also been a base for the Central Bank.

As part of a government plan to redistribute wealth around the country, the Central Bank moved 100 employees in the Central Bank’s research department and their families to this quiet, gentle mountain town of around 20,000 people.

“Central Bank’s move to Dilijan has had multiple effects,” the Armenian Central Bank chairman, Artur Javadyan, told the Bulletin on a trip to Dilijan.

“Our staff’s first concern was whether their children would have appropriate education and other facilities for permanent residence. This encouraged the Central Bank to create new and high quality infrastructures.”

It’s an ambitious project for the Central Bank to tackle. It had to build new infrastructure for its employees, such as schools, sports centres and apartment blocks, investments which have had positive drip-down effects on the local population, their shops and businesses.

And it appears to be paying off. The Central Bank employees who have moved to Dilijan, which lies in a national park, said they were enjoying the experience.

“It is great in here,” one said as birdsong floated across the air. “After a hard working day we go to play football, have some beer and rest.”

Nearby, a supermarket has experienced a boost in demand for products generated by the workers.

And Armenia’s newest financial hub — even if it is a small, embryonic one — is also a magnet for tourists interested in nature. Surrounded by forested mountains, Dilijan is famous for its natural springs which have attracted tourists from around the world.

“We’re so happy to see our city developing, where you can see the contrast of old and new,” said a Dilijan resident.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)

Turkmen President issues 1,200 amnesties

MAY 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – To celebrate Constitution Day on May 18, Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov issued an amnesty to 1,200 people languishing in Turkmenistan’s prisons, the AFP news agency reported. Mr Berdymukhamedov is given to issuing presidential amnesties to mark official holidays.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 232, published on May 20 2015)

Georgia splits interior ministry

MAY 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s government approved a plan to split the country’s much-loathed interior ministry in two.

The idea is to spin off the security and intelligence responsibilities of the interior ministry and unravel a merger created by former president Mikheil Saakashvili. He joined the two ministries together in the early part of his 2004-13 administration under the premise of cutting costs. Since then, though, its unpopularity has grown and opposition parties have pledged to break it up.

The most eye-catching part of the reform is placing the new State Security Service under parliamentary control to increase surveillance over it. The head of the State Security Service will be elected for one six year term only.

These reforms will, probably, prove popular with ordinary Georgians. They are also important at a former Soviet Union level too as they once again show Georgia’s ambitions.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 232, published on May 20 2015)