OCT. 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s ministry of sport said that if it was to win the right to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2022 it would expect advertisers and investors to fund around 66% of the costs. Kazakhstan is desperate to host the Winter Olympics but observers have said that it might not be able to afford it.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
URALSK/Kazakhstan, OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Finding a taxi in Atyrau, a city of around 200,000 people in western Kazakhstan near its Caspian Sea coast, for the 500-kilometre journey to Uralsk is easy.
During the late morning, drivers gather at the car park in front of the city’s bus station. It costs 5,500 tenge per person (around $30).
Atyrau is a dusty boomtown, relatively charmless. Good then that it is quickly left behind. North of it is the steppe, interminable and yellow-brown.
The horizon stretches in every direction and very little gets in its way.
Small villages hide down secondary roads. Entrepreneurs sell melons at a few crossroads. There are roadside burial tombs, some standing alone and others in circular formations.
For more or less the entirety of the drive there is a curved line of trees to the east. Sometimes this line of trees is directly adjacent to the road and other times it hovers far in the distance. These trees hug the banks of the Ural River, which snakes down from the Ural mountain range before emptying into the Caspian Sea.
The river is the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Just over halfway to Uralsk the landscape, though still mainly scrub, begins to liven up a bit. Previously, the only trees to be seen were grouped together in unhealthy-looking planned groves.
Very slowly, these spindly man-made groves yield to more natural looking clusters. Slopes give some shape to the terrain over the final 50km of the journey. And then, 10km, outside Uralsk there is a big hill, the first the flat horizon has been broken, after which the city makes itself known to its new arrivals.
Settled by Cossacks and full of ornate cathedrals and brightly-painted wooden houses, Uralsk is a world away from Astana’s contemporary triumphalism.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – With the rouble under increased pressure it has become likely, analysts have said, that the Kazakh government will devalue its currency for the second time this year.
Halyk Bank placed the tenge on a negative watch. The report, no longer available on the website of Halyk’s Financial Department, said the tenge would be around 210/$1 by the end of the year compared to 183/$1 currently. That’s a drop of around 10%.
“In the last three days conditions in Tenge-denominated money markets deteriorated sharply,” Halyk Bank wrote.
“Such changes usually happen before devaluations: demonetization, declining demand for Tenge- denominated assets, the rising cost of holding Tenge mirrored by the rising costs of borrowing, all illustrating a loss of confidence and the deepening of the currency crisis.”
Sabit Khakimzhanov, head of research at Halyk Bank and author of the report, attributed the weakening of the tenge to rising interest rates, rouble trouble, and oil prices below $95 per barrel.
The note will have irritated the Kazakh Central Bank which has been denying that it is planning a second devaluation of its currency. Khakimzhanov said that, unusually, an unnamed party had been buying $200m worth of tenge every day. This, analysts suspected, was the Central Bank trying to shore up its currency.
And, rather mysteriously, a few days after it was put up on its website, the currency note disappeared. Analysts at Halyk Bank told the Conway Bulletin that it was a management decision to take down its report.
Earlier this year, the government devalued the tenge overnight by 20%.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan will have cleared all the hurdles to their eventual accession into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by the end of the year, media quoted deputy PM Bakytzhan Sagintayev as saying. This is important as Kazakhstan has been negotiating entry to the WTO since the 1990s.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev sacked Abdrashit Zhukenov and Ali Komekbayev from their posts as the deputy chiefs of the Financial Police and Agency for Civil Service Affairs, part of a strategy to reorganise the agencies in charge of combating corruption.
Mr Nazarbayev has wanted the ministry of finance and the newly-created Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Anti- Corruption to take over managing corruption cases in a high-profile move aimed at grabbing the attention of international investors who are worried about corruption levels as much as people living inside Kazakhstan.
This year a number of high profile officials have been arrested and charged with corruption.
Muslim Omiraev, former deputy at the ministry of agriculture was arrested in December 2013 and sentenced to 10 years in prison (Oct. 16). Earlier in September, police arrested the former governor of Karaganda, Baurzhan Abdishev for corruption. He goes on trial in November.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 16 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh lower house of parliament ratified an extradition treaty with Italy, media reported, part of a process by Kazakhstan to update its legal treaties. Last year, Kazakhstan illegally transferred the wife of the then fugitive businessman Mukhtar Ablyazov from Rome.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh officials have earmarked four cities — Almaty, Astana, Aktobe and Shymkent — to develop as mega cities. The plan to create four hubs, which has overtures of Soviet economic planning, will cost an estimated $4b and run through to 2020.
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(News report from Issue No. 204, published on Oct. 15 2014)
OCT. 8-9 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev flew to Brussels to sign a deal that will bring Kazakhstan, economically, closer to the European Union.
Concerns, though, over Kazakhstan’s human rights and corruption records threatened to overshadow Mr Nazarbayev’s trip. He is also facing increased pressure over Kazakhstan’s alliance with Russia which is accused of aiding separatist fighters in Ukraine.
European Union and United States sanctions on Russia have hit linked-in economies, including Kazakhstan.
“Sanctions, especially economic ones, are not helpful to anyone neither Europe, nor Kazakhstan or Russia,” Mr Nazarbayev said at a joint press conference with Jose Manuel Barroso, the EU’s outgoing chief.
The EU-Kazakhstan agreement, which took nearly four years to sign, will boost Kazakhstan’s application to enter the World Trade Organisation, enhance energy and security cooperation and air travel links.
The so-called Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement also makes Kazakhstan the European Union’s most important partner both in Central Asia and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union.
Importantly tariffs remain unchanged as they are central to the Eurasian Economic Union that Kazakhstan is a member of alongside Russia and Belarus.
And this is important. Kazakhstan is trying to play both Russia and the European Union with its self-described multi-vector foreign policy. While Mr Nazarbayev talked with the European Union, Kazakh senators in Astana ratified a new Eurasian Economic Union treaty.
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(News report from Issue No. 204, published on Oct. 15 2014)
ALMATY/Kazakhstan, OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The uniformed women with bright orange hair posted at the entrance of the Soviet-era exhibition hall in Almaty, the Palace of the Republic, were stern and explicit. Nobody was allowed in.
Behind them it was clear why.
Waves of women in turquoise suits were exiting the building, some in pairs and some in small groups.
And at the side of the Palace of the Republic, a fleet of new, shiny cars were parked, all painted an almost metallic pale pink.
The suits. The impeccably made up women wearing them. The cars. Could it be? Yes, it could. A Mary Kay convention is in town.
Mary Kay, the American cosmetics company founded by US businesswoman Mary Kay Ash back in 1963, has aggressively expanded in a range of new markets. By the looks of it this includes Kazakhstan.
The uniform tailored suits are a hallmark of Mary Kay saleswomen, and the cars are a reference to the founder’s pink Cadillac, which has become a trademark for top salespeople.
Convention participants, mainly middle-aged, filtered out of the Palace of the Republic. Some posed in front of the brutalist Hotel Kazakhstan just adjacent to the Palace; others made their way via the subway under Dostyk Avenue to Kimep Grill, a canteen in the basement of the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, & Strategic Research. Here the food is cheap and decent and the queues are long.
The mostly ethnic Kazakh students seemed wildly amused at the uniformed women in their midst. One laughed and then turned to her friend: “They’re all dressed the same.”
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(News report from Issue No. 204, published on Oct. 15 2014)
OCT. 10 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – At a meeting of CIS heads of states in Minsk, Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon said Belarus and Armenia had already given it aid to bolster security along its border with Afghanistan. Tajikistan wants to join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union which counts Belarus and Kazakhstan as members. Armenia is joining in 2015.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 204, published on Oct. 15 2014)