Tag Archives: Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s Samruk-Kazyna gets Kashagan loan

OCT. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Samruk-Kazyna, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund, signed a five-year loan agreement for up to $1.5b to help fund its purchase of a 8.4% stake in the Kashagan oil field. Kazmunaigas, Kazakhstan’s state-owned energy company, agreed earlier this year to sell half its 16.81% stake in Kashagan to Samruk–Kazyna. The manoeuvre is considered a mechanism to help Kazmunaigas raise funds during this period of depressed oil prices.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Kazakhstan hoards gold

OCT. 26 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In September, Kazakhstan increased its gold reserves by 1.5% to around 213 tonnes. Kazakhstan has increased its gold holdings in each of the past 36 months. Gold prices hit a 5-year low in July but have recovered.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Stock market: Centerra Gold, KAZ Minerals

OCT. 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The US Federal Reserve Bank’s hinted that interest rates could be increased in December, hitting stock markets worldwide. South Caucasus- and Central Asia-related shares were no exception.

Miners were hit badly. Kyrgyzstan- focused Centerra Gold saw its shares lose over 9% in Toronto this week, closing at 7.36 Canadian dollars on Friday.

KAZ Minerals shares were also down 9%, closing at 116p on Friday.

After announcing it would pay a dividend to its shareholders on Oct. 30, Central Asia Metals reversed a slow start and closed on Friday, with a marginal positive growth, at 163p/share in London.

Oil and gas producers also suffered, despite oil prices gaining 2% this week with Brent crude closing at $49.5/barrel. Kazakhstan-focused Tethys Petroleum and Nostrum Oil & Gas both lost around 10% this week.

After reaching an 8-month high at £21.35/share last Friday, London-listed Bank of Georgia fell by 6.5% to £20.00. Last week its shares rallied after a healthcare group it holds a large stake in announced an IPO price range that valued the company at around $500m.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Immolation outside Nur Otan office stirs anger in Kazakhstan

OCT. 24 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A 20-year-old man set fire to himself in the city of Taraz, south Kazakhstan, outside the headquarters of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s political party, a rare suicide by immolation that would have worried the authorities.

A video uploaded onto Youtube showed Yerlan Bektibayev talking to the camera in a central square in Taraz, before pouring lighter fuel over his head, setting himself on fire and then running into the Nur Otan building.

Bektibayev spoke in Kazakh before he set himself alight, explaining that he wanted to kill himself because he couldn’t find a job and that the authorities had bullied him by planting drugs on him and locking him up in prison for a murder that he didn’t commit.

“I cannot find any other way but to die. I do not want to live,” he said on the video.

Kazakhstan has a high rate of youth suicide. The United Nations has said that it is in the top ten countries for suicides of people between the ages of 14 and 29, but, even so, Bektibayev’s choice of setting himself on fire outside the Nur Otan regional headquarters will have alarmed the authorities.

It was an overtly political back- drop to the suicide, with overtones of the immolation in Tunisia in 2010 that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.

Official media largely avoided reporting on the suicide, one TV journalist who works for a state linked channel said he was told not to report on it, and police detained the man who filmed Bektibayev’s immolation.

Social media, though, was full of conflicting opinion. Some said that Bektibayev was to blame for taking his own life, others that society had failed him.

There was no official comment either from Nur Otan or the Taraz regional government.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan move up ‘Doing Business’ survey

ALMATY, OCT. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Central Asian countries fared strikingly well in the latest Doing Business report published by the World Bank, possibly reflecting a drive to attract investment to fight off worsening economic conditions across the region.

The World Bank report singled out Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as among the ten most improved countries in the world. Georgia fell from 15th to 24th place but its overall score was deemed an improvement over last year’s. All other countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus improved their ranking.

According to the World Bank’s assessments. Kazakhstan, 41st in the rankings, made registering a property transfer faster and easier, and Uzbekistan made it easier to start a new business and access credit. It was ranked at 87th, up 54 positions from last year.

In an interview with the Bulletin, Valentina Saltane, Private Sector Development Specialist at the World Bank said Kazakhstan had reformed seven key areas.

“The only area that needs real improvement is cross-border trade,” she said. “Uzbekistan adopted three major reforms, one of which , starting a business, dates back to 2013, but became accessible to private businesses only at the end of 2014.”

Other analysts also said that Kazakhstan had been working hard to speed up various technical reforms.

Alex Nice, Eastern Europe editor at the EIU, said: “Kazakhstan has announced a range of technical reforms, to try to improve the investment climate, in response to the economic slowdown. So it’s not surprising it has moved up the rankings.”

But Mr Nice also sounded a note of caution. He said that developing countries, Kazakhstan included, hire consultants just to advise them on how to move up the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ survey.

“Kazakhstan invests a lot in promoting its image abroad, and may well have hired consultants to advise it on how to achieve a move up the rankings,” Mr Nice continued. “That doesn’t mean that the challenges to doing business in Kazakhstan have fundamentally changed.”

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Kazakhstan issues new post codes for Astana

OCT. 29 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazpochta, the Kazakh state-owned post service, signed a deal with Astana to switch to alpha- numeric post codes, evidence of the population boom in Kazakhstan’s capital city.

Post codes in Astana will now pinpoint a specific building, rather than just an area, a practice that closely resembles Britain’s custom.

The indexing system vastly increases the number of post codes available to use in Astana and will be rolled out later this year in some of the city’s new industrial developments, said Bagdat Musin, Kazpochta’s chairman.

“The new system will facilitate not only postmen, but also emergency workers,” he said.

With an official population of 860,000, doubling in the past decade, Astana has grown fast.

But it remains something of a commuter city. At the weekend Astana hollows out as the middle class head to Almaty to eat, drink, relax and party.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Tele2 profits in Kazakhstan increase by 34%

OCT. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Swedish mobile operator Tele2 posted a 34% increase in revenues at its Kazakh subsidiary in Q3 2015, compared to the same period last year. The increase was partly due to the fall in the value of the tenge. Earlier in September, Pietari Kivikko, chairman of Tele2’s Kazakh subsidiary, had predicted a fall in revenues for all telecoms companies in Kazakhstan.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Kazakh paper manufacturer accuses former directors

OCT. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Britain’s High Court decline an appeal by Maksat Arip and Baglan Zhunus, two former directors of Kazakh paper manufacturer Kagazy, against freezing their assets. Kagazy has accused Mr Arip and Mr Zhunus of misappropriating company funds in connection with Kagazy’s 2007 IPO in London and filed a $280m lawsuit. The trial will begin in April 2017.

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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Industrial investment slows in Kazakhstan

OCT. 16 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — In an effort to cut spending, Kazakhstan appears to have reduced industrial investments by 23% in the first nine months of the year, the ranking.kz website reported, an indication of the worsening economic turmoil hitting the country.

In Jan.-Sept. 2015, the government invested 220.7b tenge ($797m) in fixed industrial assets, compared to 285b in the same period last year. The sharpest decline was to public utilities.

Last November, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev unveiled the Nurly Zhol (bright path), a $24b state programme designed to support industrial and infrastructure projects in the country.

The economic decline, triggered by the fall in oil prices and sanctions on Russia, has hit this ambitious target. Kazakhstan’s officials are beginning to talk more seriously about a prolonged economic decline.

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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)

Problems at Kazakhstan’s Kcell weigh down TeliaSonera profit

OCT. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Swedish telecoms company Telia- Sonera said 2015 profit will be lower than expected due to price competition in Kazakhstan and that it is also struggling to sell its assets in Uzbekistan.

The profit warning will play badly for TeliaSonera which said last month that it wanted to sell its subsidiaries in Eurasia, of which Kcell and Ucell are the biggest.

In Jan.-Sept. 2015, Kcell’s profits fell 13% compared to the same period last year, a drop that Johan Dennelind, TeliaSonera’s CEO, blamed on competition and the government’s decision to let the tenge float free against the US dollar in August.

But Kazakhstan is not TeliaSon- era’s only problem in Central Asia. Marred by corruption allegations, TeliaSonera’s operations in

Uzbekistan have become a dead- weight, dragging the sale of the company’s assets.

“Selling Uzbekistan isn’t an easy task,” Mr Dennelind was quoted as saying in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

US and Dutch prosecutors are investigating whether TeliaSonera paid bribes to secure mobile licences in Uzbekistan in 2007 and 2008.

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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)