DEC. 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Spanish company is considering investing in the Kazakh Caspian Sea port of Aktau, the head of the state-owned Kaznex Invest, Kairat Karmanov, told media. Mr Karmanov didn’t name the Spanish company considering the deal. Aktau is Kazakhstan’s largest port and is key to exports to Europe and beyond.
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(News report from Issue No. 163, published on Dec. 4 2013)
DEC. 2 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor-General launched an investigation into possible child labour practices in southern Kazakhstan after it found 700 children picking cotton, media reported. International organisations have criticised Central Asia’s cotton industry, and in particular Uzbekistan, for using children to pick cotton harvests.
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(News report from Issue No. 163, published on Dec. 4 2013)
DEC. 4 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor-General accused the former governor of the Atyrau region, Bergei Ryskaliyev, of having links to radical Islamic groups. Mr Ryskaliyev has been on the run for over a year. He is also accused of stealing $460m.
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(News report from Issue No. 164, published on Dec. 11 2013)
NOV. 28 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two workers died and 26 are still ill after they were poisoned while working at an oil services company in Zhanaozen, west Kazakhstan, media reported. The location of the poisoning is extra sensitive in Kazakhstan because Zhanaozen was the scene of anti-government rioting in 2011.
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(News report from Issue No. 163, published on Dec. 4 2013)
DEC. 4 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan has dropped seven places in this year’s Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perception Index to 140th position.
This is not good. There are only 177 countries in the index, meaning that Kazakhstan is firmly anchored in the bottom 20% of the most corrupt countries in the world.
And it’s hardly keeping stellar company. Honduras, Laos and Uganda share the 140th position berth and from the former Soviet Union only Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are ranked lower.
“The picture is rather gloomy and can be described as stagnation across all the countries,” Svetlana Savitskaya, TI’s program coordinator for Central Asia told Radio Free Europe of the former Soviet countries’ rankings.
Of people interviewed for the index, over 40% said that corruption was a serious problem in Kazakhstan and 34% said it was getting worse.
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(News report from Issue No. 163, published on Dec. 4 2013)
NOV. 27 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The World Bank’s IFC is considering giving Britain’s Virgin Media a loan to help it expand into a group of emerging markets including Kazakhstan, media reported. Virgin Media signed a memorandum of understanding with Kazakhtelecom earlier this year.
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(News report from Issue No. 163, published on Dec. 4 2013)
NOV. 28 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russia complained to Kazakhstan after Kazakh border guards shot and killed one Russian fisherman in the Caspian Sea on Nov. 25, media reported. In the same incident, the Kazakh border guards also arrested seven other fisherman, all from the North Caucasus region of Dagestan, for fishing illegally.
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(News report from Issue No. 163, published on Dec. 4 2013)
NOV. 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A fire destroyed a large part of the Barakholka market, a scruffy site on the outskirts of Almaty where many poorer Kazakhs and migrants from China work. This is the third fire at Barakholka in the past couple of months. The Kazakh emergencies ministry has said it suspects arson.
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(News report from Issue No. 162, published on Nov. 27 2013)
NOV. 27 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — With a $2.2b fortune and the ear of the president, Bulat Utemuratov is one of the most powerful people in Kazakhstan.
Bloomberg News interviewed Mr Utemuratov at the new Rixos Borovoye hotel in northern Kazakhstan.
Mr Utemuratov is probably best known for selling his bank, ATF Bank, to Austria’s UniCredit Bank in 2007 for $2b.
And this deal, according to an excerpt from his interview with Bloomberg News, acted as a turning point in Mr Utemuratov’s business thinking.
“I decided after selling ATF Bank to UniCredit that we must stop using offshore companies and become more transparent,” he said in the Bloomberg interview.
“Everything must be clean.”
Mr Utemuratov had owned ATF Bank through a series of offshore accounts. The global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 exposed dubious accounting practices. Since then, Mr Utemuratov said he had bought or set up another couple of banks, both of which he owns transparently.
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(News report from Issue No. 162, published on Nov. 27 2013)
NOV. 25 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Nurlan Kussainov, the CEO of the state-owned Kazakhstan Development Bank, resigned, local media reported. Media reports didn’t specify why Mr Kussainov quit the post he had held since April 2011. Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna controls the Kazakhstan Development Bank.
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(News report from Issue No. 162, published on Nov. 27 2013)