JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s Central Bank said the percentage of non-performing loans held by banks had fallen from a peak of 33% to 13% because of a combination of tax breaks and state financing. It’s unclear exactly how these measures helped to reduce non-performing loans.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan has bought four SU-30 fighter jets from Russia, media reported quoting a senior Kazakh airforce commander. Kazakhstan has said that it wants to bolster its armed forces.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Kazakhstan arrested Sulambek Barkinkhoyev, the managing-director of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s flagship EXPO-2017 event, on suspicion of corruption. The arrest came a few days after police also arrested Mr Barkinkhoyev’s boss on corruption allegations.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – After 19 years of negotiations, Kazakhstan will join the World Trade Organisation (WTO) later this year after officially agreeing terms with the economic group.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev was quick to appear on TV to laud the success of the WTO entry .
“The WTO membership opens up new horizons for our econ- omy,” Mr Nazarbayev said on national TV.
Commodities make up most of Kazakhstan’s foreign trade, already carried at very low tariffs.
Tariffs are at the centre of the debate on Kazakhstan’s WTO membership.
It is also part of the Russia-led Customs Union, which morphed into the Eurasian Economic Union this year. This is, essentially, an old-school trade bloc which promotes free trade between members but puts up barriers to non-members. The other members of the Eurasian
Economic Union are Russia, Belarus and Armenia. Kyrgyzstan is on the brink of joining.
Even so, the WTO and Kaza- khstan appear to have found a way around this potential stumbling block, although the details are scant.
Kazakh industrials have also been reticent about joining the WTO.
“Our community is concerned that the accession into the WTO would seriously reduce the protection levels and cause the flooding of cheap goods into our markets, which would kill our production,” Rakhim Oshak- bayev, deputy chairman of the National Chamber of Entrepre- neurs, told Kazakh media.
The terms of the accession remain classified and analysts have questioned this secrecy. When it first applied to join the organisation in 1996, Kazakhstan was a poor country which had just emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Now, the scenario is different.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan will issue a £2b Eurobond, economy minister Yerbolat Dossayev told local media.
Mr Dossayev didn’t give specific dates for the issue but Reuters reported that Citigroup and JP Morgan are joint book- runners and Kazkommerts Securities and Halyk Finance are joint lead managers for the issue.
This is the second major dollar-denominated Eurobond that Kazakhstan has issued in the last year. In 2014, Kazakhstan issued a $2.5b Eurobond, its first since 2000.
Kazakhstan has been dealing with the fall out of a slide in global oil prices and a dip in the fortunes of Russia’s economy. Although the Central Bank has not stated just why it has borrowed so heavily in the past year, it is likely linked to this economic downturn.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s Union of Journalists handed Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence agent who is now living in exile in Russia, a special award for services to investigative journalism. The US wants Mr Snowden extradited to face espionage-related charges.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan is one of the least energy efficient countries in the world for generating economic growth, Tomasz Telma, regional director for Europe, Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, told Bnews.kz.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
ALMATY/ASTANA/ Kazakhstan , JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Politicians, teachers and schoolchildren in Kazakhstan are debating the value of a new standardised test that gives access to university grants and financial aid.
Some have linked the test to the high rate of youth suicides.
And the link may not be far-fetched. Kazakhstan has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world and it has risen since the exam was released a few years ago.
At the Hazret Sultan mosque in Astana, the largest in Central Asia, deputy Imam Maksat Kairgaliyev said that the stress the new test placed students under and the relatively high suicide rate for young people in Kazakhstan were linked.
“This has unfortunately become a pattern,” he said.
Introduced in 2009, the Unified National Test (ENT is its Russian acronym) has become less and less popular among students.
Last May in Aktobe, two 17-year old classmates killed themselves. Their suicide notes both blamed ENT. Another 18-year-old schoolgirl in southern Kazakhstan tried to kill herself just after sitting the ENT test.
Azamat, a first-year student at a university in Almaty, told the Bulletin: “Kids freak out because their future depends [on the test] and which university picks them.”
MPs have also raised concerns. In November 2012, Dariga Nazarbayeva, the eldest daughter of the president and member of the Parliament, was among the first to connect the ENT to youth suicides during a question time with the minister of education.
But the government has defended bringing in the ENT as an effective way of measuring who the best people are to receive grants and various financial aid. Deputy PM Berdybek Saparbayev said the link is inappropriate. “High numbers of suicide are recorded in our country every year,” he said. “But it’s not appropriate to link that to the youth fearing the ENT.”
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan increased its gold reserves for the 32nd month in a row, the IMF said. Kazakhstan’s gold reserves measure 203.4 tonnes. Despite spending heavily to protect the tenge, the Kazakh Central Bank has maintained its policy of buying gold.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh Central Bank cancelled BTA’s banking licence, officially ending its banking activities. BTA, which had once been one of Kazakhstan’s biggest banks, merged with Kazkommertzbank earlier this year. It assumed a massive proportion of bad debt in the 2008/9 Global Financial Crisis.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)