JAN. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazatomprom, Kazakhstan’s
nuclear agency, has agreed a $450m debt deal with Western banks.
The deal, and its size, show that despite an economic downturn some
Kazakh companies are still considered a relatively good bet.
Kazakhstan owns 15% of the world’s uranium supplies.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 215, published on Jan. 21 2015)
>>Currency devaluation inflated early data>>
JAN. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The number of property deals in Kazakhstan dropped by over 13% last year, the State Statistics Committee data showed, more evidence of a downturn in the economy.
The biggest drops in the number of property transactions were in North Kazakhstan — a fall of 25% in the number of property deals in 2014 compared to 2013 — and the Akmola, Almaty and Karaganda regions which all had a fall of around 20%.
Only some of the western regions, experiencing something of an oil boom, enjoyed a small increase in the property market in 2014.
This is all bad news for Kazakhstan which is trying to keep its tenge currency strong despite a fall in the price of oil and a drop in the value of the Russian rouble.
Earlier, the shrink in Kazakhstan’s property market had been disguised by figures which showed that the value of the deals had actually increased by over 10% in 2014. A currency devaluation of 20% in February 2014 inflated the value of transactions in the Kazakh market.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
JAN. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Car imports to Kazakhstan from Russia have jumped in the past two months to 2,859 from 2,005 during the same period in 2013, Kazakh media reported quoting government officials. The upturn is linked to the currency discrepancies. The rouble has nose-dived but the Kazakh Central Bank has kept the tenge strong.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
JAN. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — A video distributed by the extremist group IS reportedly shows a Kazakh boy aged 10-years-old shooting dead two men who are said to have worked for the Russian intelligence agencies. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said that the boy appears to be the same boy shown in an IS propaganda video at the end of last year.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
JAN. 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — On his first major foreign trip of 2015, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev travelled to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Reports from Berlin said the two leaders discussed the Ukraine war and developing business links.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
JAN. 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Kazakh court extended the pre-trial house arrest of former PM Serik Akhmetov. Mr Akhmetov, who was arrested in November and accused of corruption, was Kazakh PM between Sept. 2012 and April 2014. His fall from grace highlights the fragile nature of power in Kazakhstan.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
>>Demonstration against closure of political magazine>>
JAN. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a rare show of public dissent in Kazakhstan, a small crowd gathered in Almaty to protest against the closure of weekly opposition newspaper Adam bol”.
Led by the newspaper editor, Gulzhan Yergaliyeva, a group of 25 journalists and activists walked across the Arbat, a pedestrian and commercial zone in the centre of the former capital shouting slogans and waving placards that challenged Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev to rescind the order to close the magazine.
Black-clad security officers stood to the side closely monitoring the protest.
“The presence of ‘men in black’ is always felt at these events,” Dina Baidildayeva a high-profile blogger who filmed the protest told the Bulletin.
The authorities in Kazakhstan have clamped down on political pluralism and media freedom over the past few years, especially in the wake of the Zhanaozen riots in west Kazakhstan in 2011 that killed at least 15 people. Allowing the Adam bol demonstration, therefore, was fairly remarkable.
The newspaper was shut down last November, after it published an article on Ukraine that highlighted Kazakhs fighting in the Ukrainian civil war. The article also questioned Russia’s role in the conflict.
Nate Schenkkan, Central Asia programme officer at the US media watchdog NGO Freedom House, said: “The article on Ukraine could have been just a pretext to do away with an uncomfortable publication for the leadership.”
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
KYZYLORDA/Kazakhstan, JAN. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Vegetarianism is growing in popularity in Kazakhstan although ordering it successfully can still be a challenge, even for a well-known pop star.
Pasquale Caprino, an Italian singer who goes by the name of Son Pascal and has made Kazakhstan his home, was trying to order a bowl of vegetarian soup at a restaurant in Kyzylorda.
He’d headed out to this remote and barren medium-sized town in south-central Kazakhstan to shoot a music video.
The restaurant was making an effort with its Alpine chalet-style decorations and uniforms for the staff. It contrasted nicely with the concrete skyline outside. In the corner, overlooking the diners was a full-sized taxidermy of a snarling wolf.
Caprino wanted a bowl of cucumber soup without meat. It arrived, though, with sausage floating amongst the ubiquitous dill. Caprino tried again but in Kazakhstan where eating meat, including horsemeat, is ingrained into the national consciousness the waitress thought that she was being teased. He sighed and pushed away the bowl.
This story of frustration for vegetarians is common in Kazakhstan, said Baur Safi and Stanley Currier — two Almaty-based bloggers who run the vegetaristan.com website.
“During holidays or weddings, it is extremely difficult to find anything other than bread and a cucumber and tomato salad that a vegetarian can eat,” said Currier, a native of California.
Safi, a Kazakh, said, though, that it had become far easier in Almaty, at least, to order vegetarian dishes than it had been several years ago. Much of this is down to the introduction of cuisines that don’t use meat rather than any sort of pro-vegetarian groundswell.
“Many locals equate being vegetarian to being gay,” he said. “It’s a question of ethics, as if you’re trying to be special, and of machismo, which is linked to eating meat.”
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
JAN. 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Food prices in Kazakhstan have increased by nearly 20%, the news website zakon.kz reported. Its unofficial survey of prices said they had risen far more than the official Statistics Committee data showed. Wheat, zakon.kz reported, had increased the most with a 25% rise in 2014.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 214, published on Jan. 14 2015)
JAN. 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Currency woes in 2015 quickly translated into inflation across the South Caucasus and Central Asia.
Kazakhstan can be singled out as the worst performer in this department as inflation grew by a staggering 13.6% in 2015.
It was only in November that the minister of economy Yerbolat Dossayev said inflation wouldn’t surpass 10% in 2015. He was clearly wrong.
Interestingly, food prices grew significantly in Kazakhstan (+10.9%), while in Kyrgyzstan it was precisely food items that kept inflation from going too high.
Kyrgyzstan’s 11-month inflation in 2015 was 6.8% overall, but food prices decreased by 4.8% (Jan. 5).
Geostat, the Georgian statistics service, said annual inflation amounted to 4.9% in December, a 0.6% deflation compared to the previous month driven by lower transport and fuel prices, another impact of low oil prices.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)