Tag Archives: Kazakhstan

Manufacturing confidence in Kazakhstan is recovering

MARCH 1 2021 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s Tengri Partners/IHS Market PMI index, a measure of manufacturing confidence, increased to 48.5 in February from a nine month low of 45.6 in January. Explaining the data, Anuar Ushbayev, managing partner at Tengri Partners, said that sentiment reflected a slowing of the economic downturn linked to the coronavirus pandemic.

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— This story was published in issue 474 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on March 5 2021

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Police in Almaty detain demonstrators

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FEB. 28 2021 (The Bulletin) — Police in Almaty detained dozens of protesters who had been calling for the release of political prisoners in the largest anti-government demonstrations in Kazakhstan this year. In what has become fairly standard practice in Kazakhstan, police stopped protesters gathering in city centre squares and parks and detained leaders en route to the meetings. Activists have said that the right to protest barely exists in Kazakhstan.

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— This story was published in issue 474 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on March 5 2021

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Kazakh authorities clamp down on anti-China protests

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ALMATY/FEB. 10 2021 (The Bulletin) — Apparently unconcerned by hardening language from the West towards Beijing and its treatment of ethnic Kazakhs and Uyghurs, the authorities in Kazakhstan jailed a man for protesting outside the Chinese consulate in Almaty.

Media reported that police detained Baibolat Kunbolatuly, who was part of a 10-person protest mainly of women holding photos of missing sons, brothers and husbands outside the consulate the day before, and that a court then efficiently sentenced him to 10 days in jail for breaking rules around mass gatherings. In Kazakhstan, protests require written permission from the authorities.

Mr Kunbolatuly had been protesting against the disappearance of his brother in China, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. He suspects that his brother is being held in one of China’s, by now notorious, re-education camps which have been built in Xinjiang province over the past four years to hold hundreds of thousands of Muslims.

China has said that the camps are education-focused and that they are designed to help ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs improve themselves. Human rights groups have called them prisons, a view Western governments are coming round to.

In Kazakhstan, reporting on the camps in Xinjiang has been minimal but protests against China and its actions in Xinjiang are becoming more widespread.

The issue of China’s treatment of its Muslim minorities in Xinjiang is a thorny issue for the Kazakh government.

It is reliant on Chinese cash to fund various infrastructure projects and China is also a major stakeholder in Kazakh industry. The flipside is that there are an estimated 200,000 ethnic Kazakhs living in Xinjiang and a large ethnic Uyghur population living in Kazakhstan.

And, embarrassingly for Kazakh officials, the major information leaks from Xinjiang over the past few years have also come from Kazakhs escaping over the border into Kazakhstan. They now want to prove to their Chinese counterparts that they are reliable partners.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Kazakh pilot makes emergency landing on road

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FEB. 8 2021 (The Bulletin) — A Kazakh pilot made an emergency landing with his single-engine biplane on a road in east Kazakhstan. Media reported that the pilot made the emergency landing on the road near Ust-Kamenogorsk after power in the single-engine of his An-2 plane failed. There were three crew and two medical staff on the flight. Nobody was injured. An-2 were mass-produced by the Soviet Union after WW2 and are known for their durability.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Eurasian Economic Union wants to streamline migrant worker processes

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ALMATY/FEB. 5 2021 (The Bulletin) — The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) wants to speed up the digitalisation of labour migrants’ documents to help member states recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

At a meeting of heads of governments of EAEU member states in Almaty, Russian PM Mikhail Mishustin said that reviving labour markets, cutting down on paperwork through digital records and providing vaccines so that people can travel for work was vitally important for the bloc.

“This is a single service that you can use to find vacancies, draw up the necessary documents, including medical insurance and it will also help with the choice of housing,” he said of a digitalisation plan.

Critics of the EAEU — which has been in operation since 2015 and, alongside Russia includes Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan as members — have said that the bloc pushes the Kremlin’s agenda and that it is cumbersome, creates red tape and is slow to get things done.

They also said that the plan put forward by Mr Mishustin may be a case in point. He envisages it coming into action in 2022.

But pressure is building on the EAEU to reform and to become more nimble. At the Almaty meeting, Kyrgyz’s PM Ulubek Maripov described the need to tear down barriers that slow labour movement in the EAEU as “acute”.

Russia attracts millions of labour migrants from Central Asia each year, generating huge remittance flows. This dried up in 2020 because of the pandemic. Businesses in Russia now complain about a lack of cheap labour and in Central Asia, governments report a sharp drop in remittances.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Nova Resources increases bid for KAZ Minerals

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ALMATY/FEB. 4 2021 (The Bulletin) — Nova Resources, a company linked to the Kazakh elite, increased its offer to buy miner KAZ Minerals off the London Stock Exchange by 22% because of rising copper prices.

In a takeover bid that has become increasingly acrimonious, Nova Resources, which is led by KAZ Minerals chairman Oleg Novachuk and former chairman Vladimir Kim, wrote to shareholders to promote what it said was a “compelling valuation”.

“The major reason we want to take this company off-market is because as a public company we do not have enough entrepreneurial flexibility to run this kind of risk,” the letter said.

Some analysts take a different view. They have said that both Mr Novachuk and Mr Kim are close to the top of the Kazakh elite and that these elite have now decided to pull in their assets. This includes, the analysts said, taking KAZ Minerals off the London Stock Exchange.

And there is precedence. In 2013, after a number of corruption allegations, the founders of ENRC took the company off the London Stock Exchange. ENRC was also a Kazakh mining company linked to the Kazakh elite.

Last year, KAZ Minerals bought the $8b copper mine Baimskaya in Chukotka, Far East Russia. The project, one of the biggest copper projects in the world, has been delayed because of a Russian government drive to upgrade infrastructure across the remote region that will slow the Baimskaya development.

Nova Resources wants to buy the 61% of KAZ Minerals that it doesn’t own but some shareholders have said that the new offer is still too low.

“As we forecast that KEC Minerals will generate more than $5.5bn of ebitda over the next three years, it is our opinion that the £7.80 per share offer price still materially undervalues the company,” said London-based fund RWC Partners.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Kazakhstan takes delivery of Russian missiles

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FEB. 3 2021 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s military said that it had taken deployment of its first Buk-M2 missile defence system from Russia. The deal was announced in 2018 and will cement Kazakhstan’s place within Russia’s wider military sphere of influence.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Kazakh billionaire Ibragimov dies

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ALMATY/FEB. 3 2021 (The Bulletin) — Billionaire Alizhan Ibragimov, one of the wealthiest men in Kazakhstan, died aged 67.

Ibragimov, an ethnic Uyghur, was part of a group of businessmen known as the Euraisan Trio which controlled Kazakh miner ENRC. This trio, which also includes Aleksandr Mashkevich and Patokh Shodiev, became a familiar feature in the British press for seven years from 2006 during ENRC’s tumultuous listing on the London Stock Exchange.

ENRC went from breaking new ground as the first miner in the former Soviet Union outside Russia to list on a Western stock exchange, to acrimony after Ibragimov and his partners bought it off the LSE in 2013, reportedly for nearly $5b, in the face of mounting corruption allegations.

After it delisted from the LSE, ENRC rebranded as Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. It owned several other companies too.

The Eurasian Trio were said to be working in close cooperation, perhaps even on behalf of, the Kazakh elite. Ibragimov was ranked by the Forbes business magazine as one of the five richest men in Kazakhstan with a wealth of $2.3b.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Kazakhstan’s Scat Air agrees deal to fly to Ras Al Khaimah

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FEB. 3 2021 (The Bulletin) — Scat Air, a private Kazakh airline based in Shymkent, will start flying to Ras Al Khaimah under an agreement signed with the UAE state’s tourism development authority. Under the deal, Scat Air will, from March, fly directly to Ras Al Khaimah from Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Aktobe, Aktau, Atyrau, Uralsk, Karaganda and Shymkent. The terms of the deal have not been revealed. Ras Al Khaimah has said that it is on a major tourism push.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021

Kazatomprom says will reduce output in 2021

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FEB. 1 2021 (The Bulletin) — In production guidance for 2021, Kazakh uranium producer Kazatomprom said that it would continue to reduce output in line with a plan put forward in 2018 to boost uranium prices. It also said that its output had been hit by the coronavirus pandemic and that it had been forced to suspend production at two sites in Turkestan, south Kazakhstan. Kazatomprom has a listing on the London Stock Exchange and is the world’s biggest uranium miner.

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— This story was first published in issue 471 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin