JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — UNICEF, the UN agency for children, said Kazakhstan is on target to hit its millennium goal of reducing infant mortality to two-thirds its 1990 rate. In 2012, infant mortality in Kazakhstan was 19 deaths per 1,000 live births, UNICEF reported.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two of the key core strengths of Britain’s Virgin Group and its founder Sir Richard Branson are self-publicity and business acumen. It may be bringing both of these strengths to the Kazakh telecoms market.
Virgin Group spans a handful of sectors including trains, aviation, banking, travel, health clubs and telecoms. In 2011, according to its website, Virgin Group employed 50,000 people across the world and earned revenues of about $21b.
Perhaps its biggest assets, though, are the Virgin brand and a sense of flair. Sir Richard set up Virgin in 1970 and its slanted, hand-written logo is now recognisable around the world.
Virgin Mobile Central and Eastern Europe was one of the British companies that signed deals with Kazakh businesses during a trip to Kazakhstan by British PM David Cameron earlier this month.
Launched in 2012, Virgin Mobile Central and Eastern Europe is currently only offering a mobile phone service in Poland. This, though, could change.
It may just have been a so-called memorandum of understanding with Kazakh Telecom but this is still significant as it could mean a Virgin branded broadband and telecoms business offering services to people in Kazakhstan. As an indication of Kazakhstan’s development, Virgin’s potential entry is interesting and, possibly, significant.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 8 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — More than 200 workers at a subcontractor for oil fields service company Cape International Plc and Manpower Ltd in Atyrau, west Kazakhstan, went on strike for two days over job losses, media quoted the local prosecutor-general’s office as saying. The workers are employed on the Kashagan oil project in the Caspian Sea.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh authorities’ hunt for opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov has taken a distinctly geo-political twist.
On July 12, a court in Italy ruled that the Italian authorities had illegally detained and extradited to Kazakhstan Alma Shalabayeva, wife of Ablyazov, and their daughter. They had been living for several months in a villa outside Rome when armed, masked men detained them in a night raid at the end of May. Two days later they were on a plane back to Kazakhstan. Most standard procedures, the government has now said, were ignored.
Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, is suspected of ordering the extradition, although he has denied this.
Mr Alfano, the interior minister, is a close ally of Italy’s former PM Silvio Berlusconi who is often described as a friend of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Ablyazov is wanted in Kazakhstan for allegedly embezzling billions of dollars from BTA Bank, where he had been chairman before fleeing in 2009, and financing opposition forces. He is also on the run from British police for perjury.
Regardless of the row that has erupted in Italy, Ablyazov is still on the run. Until he is captured the Kazakh authorities will both pull in more favours across the globe and continue to pressure opponents at home.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Human rights lobby group Amnesty International released a report accusing the Kazakh government of using torture on prisoners. The report focused on people detained during the 2011 clashes between protesters and police in Zhanaozen, west Kazakhstan. The Kazakh government has previously refuted allegations of torture.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Kazakhstan have vowed to improve the reputation and effectiveness of the police. They have introduced fitness and aptitude tests and prosecuted various senior police officers for bribe taking.
According to a new survey by the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International (TI), though, they have a long way to go.
In TI’s annual Global Corruption Barometer, more than half of the Kazakh interviewees said they had a paid a bribe to the police in the past year.
Of course there were other services that also rated poorly for bribe taking, including so-called land services, medical services, the judiciary and education. In each case over a quarter of the respondents said they had paid a bribe but illegal payments to the police were noticeably worse.
Perhaps more worrying for the Kazakh authorities was the answer to the question on whether interviewees felt corruption had gotten worse or better over the past year. Nearly 35% answered that corruption in Kazakhstan had worsened in the past 12 months compared with 21% who said it had improved.
For their global corruption barometer, TI surveyed 1,000 people in each of 107 countries between September 2012 and March this year. The results are by no means definitive but, for Kazakhstan at least, they do make for an interesting, and important, snapshot.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Italy ruled that the extradition to Kazakhstan of the wife of former Kazakh banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, Alma Shalabayeva, from Rome in May was illegal. Questions have been asked about the relationship between Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Italian officials who sanctioned the extradition.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 6 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan celebrated the 15th anniversary of its capital city, Astana. Astana Day, as it has been dubbed, coincides with celebrations for President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s birthday. His critics say that he is creating a cult of personality and that Astana has been built in his image.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The chairman of Kazakh bank BTA, Erik Balapanov, resigned. The Kazakh government owns a majority stake in BTA bank, which it rescued from collapse during the 2008/9 global financial crisis. Mr Balapanov had been chairman of BTA Bank, which has debts of around $12b, since August 2012.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Netherlands-registered Venus Airport Investments BV will pay out $3b tenge ($19.7m) in dividends to its shareholders on profits from its sole ownership of Almaty International Airport, media reported. Venus Airport Investments bought Almaty airport in 2011. It is linked to members of the Kazakh elite.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)