JAN. 10 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government will relax rules for migrant workers from February 2014, media reported. Migrant workers will be allowed to stay in Kazakhstan for a year if they hold a bank account. The labour ministry said there were 174,000 migrant workers in Kazakhstan last year. It estimated that this would rise to 500,000 by 2015.
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(News report from Issue No. 167, published on Jan. 15 2014)
JAN. 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will increase the amount of oil it sends to refineries in western China for processing into oil-based products, media reported quoting the Kazakh energy ministry. Kazakhstan has three refineries, not enough to meet the growing demand for oil-based products. Sending oil to Chinese refineries increases Kazakhstan’s reliance on China.
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(News report from Issue No. 167, published on Jan. 15 2014)
JAN. 10 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Mukhtarbay Otelbayev, a Kazakh mathematician based in Astana, has solved the Navier-Stokes equation, dubbed “one of the problems of the millennium”, media reported. Mr Otelbayev’s claim has not yet been independently verified.
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(News report from Issue No. 167, published on Jan. 15 2014)
JAN. 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Dariga Nazarbayeva, eldest daughter of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and a member of parliament, suggested giving pharmaceutical companies the right to harvest wild marijuana growing in southern Kazakhstan. Ms Nazarbayeva said the government had spent enough resources trying to control the marijuana growth.
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(News report from Issue No. 167, published on Jan. 15 2014)
DEC. 20 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will send soldiers on UN missions for the first time, in an attempt to bolster its international credentials. Twenty Kazakh officers will join UN missions in Haiti, Western Sahara, Ivory Coast and Liberia. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev wants to win a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
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(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)
DEC. 24 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh authorities allowed Alma Shalabayeva, wife of dissident Kazakh banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, to leave Kazakhstan and return to Italy from where she was deported in May. Mr Ablyazov is currently in French custody waiting the result of an extradition request from Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)
DEC. 31 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will produce 50% more cars in 2014 than it did in 2013, Kazakhstan’s Auto Business Association (ABA) said. The forecast is another indication of just how fast Kazakhstan’s car-making business has expanded. In 2014, the ABA said that Kazakhstan would produce 53,000 cars, 25% of total domestic demand.
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(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)
DEC. 23 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — So, it looks as if, finally, the Kazakh government has found a way of offloading its stake in the troubled BTA Bank.
An official press release confirmed the sale of a controlling stake in BTA Bank to Kazkommertsbank, also known as KazKom, and businessman Kenes Rakishev.
BTA Bank has the highest proportion of bad debt among Kazakhstan’s banks. Most analysts consider its shares to be virtually toxic and in November Halyk Bank, owned by the daughter and son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, declined to buy the government’s stake.
KazKom and Mr Rakishev, however, went through with the deal — probably for political, rather than commercial, reasons.
Nurlan Subkhanberdin, who lives in London, is the biggest shareholder in KazKom. Mr Subkhanberdin has fallen out of favour with the authorities over the past few years and has been looking for ways to rebuild relations.
Mr Rakishev — the son-in-law of the mayor of Astana, Imangali Tasmagambetov — is an increasingly high profile member of the Kazakh business elite who, again, may have been looking to shore up his position.
In any case, KazKom and Mr Rakishev have formed a consortium of investors that signed a preliminary nonbinding agreement to purchase equal shares in BTA Bank from Samruk-Kazyna, the Kazakh sovereign wealth fund. Samruk-Kazyna will still maintain a minority share in BTA Bank.
It’s unclear how much Mr Rakishev and KazKom agreed to pay for BTA Bank but it is safe to say it will be a fraction of the $7b that the government spent buying a 97.3% stake in BTA Bank in 2008/9 to save it from collapse.
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(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)
DEC. 23 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The state-owned Development Bank of Kazakhstan plans to inject $800m into the economy through loans to small and medium sized industrial projects, said Kuandyk Bishimbayev, CEO of NUH Bayterek, the state holding company that owns the bank. Mr Bishimbayev said lending to small businesses has drop by 25% in the past year.
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(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)
DEC. 30 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — ArcelorMittal will cut hundreds of jobs at its steel plant in Temirtau, central Kazakhstan as it attempts to stem loses from declining global demand.
A Conway Bulletin correspondent in Almaty said the local trade union had estimated that 2,500 jobs would be lost, roughly 17% of the workforce. Although the numbers were not confirmed by ArcelorMittal, the management did agree that jobs would be cut.
Temirtau is a classic monogorod, the Russian term given to cities that survive on one industry, and the job losses will deal a heavy blow economically and psychologically.
The Termirtau steel plant is one of the biggest non-energy projects in the country and also where Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev worked before moving into politics.
In a statement on the company’s website, Vijay Mahadevan, CEO of ArcelorMittal Temirtau, said orders for the company’s products had fallen by 12.5% in the last two years triggering the cuts.
General global demand for steel products remains weak and one of the factory’s key clients, Iran, has been suffering from heavy sanctions that have undermined its economy further.
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(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)