AUG. 8 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged France not to extradite former Kazakh banker Mukhtar Ablyazov to Kazakhstan where he is wanted on various charges including stealing billions of dollars and plotting a series of bomb attacks. HRW said Ablyazov was at risk of ill-treatment. French police arrested Ablyazov earlier this month.
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(News report from Issue No. 147, published on Aug. 12 2013)
AUG. 9 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — In an interview with the FT, Umirzak Shukeyev, chairman of Kazakhstan’s $80b sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna, said he wanted to streamline the organisation and improve corporate governance standards. Over the past few years, Kazakh companies have attracted increased criticism on governance issues.
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(News report from Issue No. 147, published on Aug. 12 2013)
AUG. 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmen officials have pulled the quasi-religious book written by former President Saparmurat Niyazov from the national curriculum, media reported. The autocratic Niyazov ruled Turkmenistan from independence in 1991 until he died in 2006. He wrote Rukhnama in 2001 and insisted that school children studied it.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
AUG. 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi acquitted Bacho Akhalaia, Georgia’s former interior minister and an ally of President Mikheil Saakashvili, of abusing his office. Mr Akhalaia still faces two other charges, including instigating a prison mutiny, in one of the most politically sensitive trials in Georgia in recent years.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
AUG. 5 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — So, in the end, he hadn’t gotten very far. After nearly 18 months, police found the 50-year-old Mukhtar Ablyazov hiding in a luxury villa near Cannes on France’s sun drenched southern coast.
Kazakh prosecutors want to charge Ablyazov with trying to overthrow President Nursultan Nazarbayev and planning a series of bomb attacks in Almaty. He had moved to London to escape the Kazakh authorities but has been on the run since fleeing a court that convicted him of perjury. That was back in February 2012 during Ablyazov’s protracted case with BTA Bank, the Kazakh bank he used to be chair, which had accused him of embezzling billions.
Now Kazakhstan needs to work out how to get Ablyazov back to face prosecutors.
The problem for Mr Nazarbayev is that France can’t extradite him directly because Kazakhstan is not a member of the Council of Europe’s Extradition Convention.
This could have been a problem except, conveniently, Ukraine, which is a member of the extradition convention, has issued an extradition request for Ablayzov to face fraud charges. From Kiev, Ablyazov could then be sent on to Kazakhstan.
It promises to be a protracted extradition battle with human rights groups already warning the French government that Ablyazov is unlikely to get a fair hearing.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
AUG. 2 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A pre-election spending spree on various social projects will push Azerbaijan into a budget deficit for the first time in a decade, Bloomberg quoted the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s as saying. Azerbaijan’s presidential election is scheduled for October. Ilham Aliyev is running for a third consecutive term.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
ASTANA, JULY 29 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — With typical panache, the Kazakh capital marked its 15th birthday on July 6. By no coincidence Astana Day, as the public holiday is called, is also the birthday of the long-serving president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Astana is Mr Nazarbayev’s pet project. He moved the capital from Almaty, in the lush foothills of the Tien Shan mountains to the barren northern steppes in 1997.
On Astana Day, the reflection of skyscrapers made of steel and glass shimmered in the waters of the Yesil River. Crowds gathered around the Pyramid of Peace, designed by British architect Norman Foster, and the Kazakh Country column symbolising Kazakhstan’s sovereignty. A sculpture of Mr Nazarbayev is embedded into the column’s plinth.
For his critics this sort of architectural eulogy proves Mr Nazarbayev is fostering a cult of personality.
This year, a festival of Kazakh nomadic culture took place outside the Khan Shatyr shopping mall, whose swooping design resembles the regal tent of the nomadic rulers of old.
One poet sang of a time when Astana celebrated its 1,500th anniversary. By then Mr Nazarbayev will be long gone but probably not forgotten. Most Kazakhs believe Astana, which means capital, is destined one day to bear a more evocative name — that of Mr Nazarbayev himself.
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(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)
JULY 24 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Three months before a presidential election, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev gave 155 journalists apartments in a new Baku housing block. Critics of the president said the move was a crude effort to manipulate the media.
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(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)
JULY 29 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — As expected, Davit Bakradze will represent the United National Movement party (UNM) in Georgia’s presidential election set for Oct. 27.
Mr Bakradze had to formally win the support of UNM delegates in six regions before officially becoming their candidate.
The 41-year-old Mr Bakradze won a seat in Georgia’s parliament aged 31 in April 2004 in the first parliamentary election after the 2003 Rose Revolution that had ushered Mikheil Saakashvili into power.
He is an experienced operator, taking over from Nino Burjanadze as head of the UNM’s parliamentary group in 2008 when she quit the party. Ms Burjanadze is also standing in the election as an independent. One of her election pledges is to see Mr Saakashvili prosecuted for various crimes that she alleges. Giorgi Margvelashvili, the current education minister, is the presidential candidate for Georgian Dream, a coalition headed by PM Bidzina Ivanishvili.
It’s lining up to be a colourful, and turbulent, time for Georgia. Its politics have always been partisan but since Mr Ivanishvili won a parliamentary election last year the animosity between the sides has become even more acute.
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(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)
JULY 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Tajik authorities have said they have found a body in a river that could be the leader of the minority Uzbek group in Tajikistan, Salim Shamsiddinov, who went missing in March, media reported. Analysts have said Mr Shamsiddinov’s disappearance may be linked to his business interests or to his politics.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)