May 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin)- Kazakhstan will give Afghanistan around $2m of emergency aid in 2014, emergencies minister Vladimir Bozhko said. The West has been putting more pressure on Afghanistan’s neighbours, and especially Kazakhstan, to play amore prominent role in Afghanistan once NATO forces quit the country.
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(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)
MAY 14 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Almaty city filed a law suit in California against former mayor Viktor Khrapunov which it accuses of systematic corruption. Mr Khrapunov was mayor of Almaty between 2004 and 2007. He was briefly minister of emergencies before he fled to Switzerland. He is a resident of Switzerland and listed as one of its richest people.
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – KazMunaiGas, the Kazakh state energy company, said it had found oil at an onshore site, media reported. The discovery was part of the Rozhkovskoye field near the north-western city of Uralsk. It’s currently unclear how large the discovery is.
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 8 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – For the third year in a row, Kazakhstan’s Central Bank won the award for the best-designed new banknote. This year a new yellow and brown 1,000 tenge note commemorating the historical warrior leader Kultegin won the prize. Kazakhstan views the award as a way of boosting its international status.
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh Central Bank should relax its monetary policy and allow the tenge to appreciate, media quoted the IMF as saying after a field trip to Kazakhstan.
It said that the tenge was now undervalued and that the narrow band that the Central Bank anchors the currency in should be widened.
In February, the Kazakh Central Bank suddenly cut the value of the tenge by 20%, a move the IMF said could trigger inflationary pressure.
The assessment is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Kazakh Central Bank and its policies.
It appears that Kazakh consumers, also, agree with the IMF. Fresh data showed that since December the amount of savings held in US dollars has increased by around a third. People are clearly nervous of the tenge.
The IMF also highlighted a much talked about weakness in the Kazakh economy; the high proportion of non-performing loans. Roughly a third of all loans are considered non- performing and this, the IMF said, had to be cut.
A senior manager in the currency sector in Almaty said that both relaxing the band that the tenge was held in and cutting the proportion of non-performing loans was wishful thinking by the IMF.
“Such a decision would mean creating panic in the society,” he said on condition of anonymity of the IMF’s proposal to relax the currency band.
“The government wants the opposite. Everything has to be calm and quiet. Increasing the range would enhance speculative moves in the currency market.”
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kairat Kelimbetov, head of the Kazakh Central Bank, said he was concerned about the negative impact on Kazakhstan’s economy of sanctions on Russia. Mr Kelimbetov said 7% of Kazakhstan’s exports went to Russia and 36% of its imports came from Russia. Remittances are also important.
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 12 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan has temporarily banned alcohol imports from Italy, France, Scotland, Belarus and Russia because some of the labelling does not meet requirements laid out by the Customs Union, media reported. It’s unclear exactly what guidelines the alcohol importers have failed to hit.
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 8 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev appears to have triggered a minor international row by snubbing a meeting of a former Soviet military group in favour of talks with a senior US diplomat.
Mr Nazarbayev had been due to travel to Moscow for a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a military group that includes Russia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.
Instead he decided to meet with the US deputy Secretary of State, William Burns, in Astana.
Officials were quick to deny there was a problem even though all the other CSTO leaders turned up in Moscow for a meeting chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr Nazarbayev was conspicuous by his absence.
Back in Astana, to make the situation even more uncomfortable for Mr Nazarbayev, diplomats told journalists that Mr Burns had asked Mr Nazarbayev to try and use his influence with Mr Putin to relax Russia’s pressure in eastern Ukraine.
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
OSKEMEN/Kazakhstan, May 14 (The Conway Bulletin) — Yerkimbek Ayazbayev pointed at the billboard sitting on the top of the local government headquarters in this town in north-east Kazakhstan.
He read the slogan, written in both Kazakh and Russian, aloud: “Unity is the guarantee of success.” It had the ring of a Soviet-style mantra.
Under orders from central government, officials in northern Kazakhstan are urgently pressing this message home. They’re nervous because events in Ukraine have shaken up the former Soviet region’s fragile ethnic divisions.
Ayazbayev is a man with a mission. He runs the local branch of the Assembly of People of Kazakhstan, a government-backed body representing the interests of Kazakhstan’s myriad ethnic groups, which numbered over 120 at last count.
It’s the job of Ayazbayev, an ethnic Kazakh, to drive home the mantra of ethnic harmony. He does this, seemingly, with the zeal of a true believer.
“We’re a multi-ethnic state and let’s say so proudly,” he said.
Russians equal around 25% of the population nationwide, but here in Oskemen over two-thirds of people are ethnic Russian. Oskemen is the Kazakh name for the Soviet city of Ust Kamenogorsk.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 73, is hugely popular with Russians in Oskemen, but they are divided about the community’s prospects in the looming post-Nazarbayev future.
While the older generation is happy to stay in Kazakhstan, many of the younger ethnic Russians see their future over the border.
Student Anna Prokayeva plans to go and study in Russia. “I don’t want to come back to Kazakhstan,” she said. “This is my homeland, and no-one’s discriminating against me but I think I’ll feel more comfortable there.”
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(News report from Issue No. 184, published on May 14 2014)
MAY 3 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s economy minister, Yerbolat Dossayev, said the so-called People’s IPO would finally go ahead next month. The People’s IPO has been continually delayed. Mr Dossayev said the first round of sell offs of state assets would include subsidies of energy company Kazmunaigas and railway company Temir Zholy.
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(News report from Issue No. 183, published on May 7 2014)