Tag Archives: politics

Georgian president rows with ex-GD colleagues

TBILISI, APRIL 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In his annual address to Parliament, Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili accused the ruling Georgian Dream party of hampering the democratic development of the country, reflecting the growing rift between the head of state and his former parliamentary colleagues.

Mr Margvelashvili main frustrations were the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling party, the lack of dialogue with the opposition and constitutional reforms which will turn the presidency into a token position.

Last year the Georgian Dream crushed its main rival, the United National Movement party of former president Mikheil Saakashvili in a parliamentary election. It won an outright majority but Mr Margvelashvili said that it had failed to achieve any lasting good despite its dominance.

“Last November, I addressed the newly elected parliament and said the formation of a constitutional majority raised the threat of concentration of power, but at the same time raised the prospect of bold reforms and initiatives,” he said. “What do we actually have five months later? The potential threat has become a serious problem, and the dynamics of reforms are not impressive.”

Mr Margvelashvili was elected president in 2013 as Georgian Dream’s candidate. However, his relationship with the ruling party has collapsed.

Ghia Nodia, professor of politics and director of the International School of Caucasus Studies in Ilia Chavchavadze State University in Tbilisi, said that the row between Mr Margvelashvili and Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man and the power behind the Georgian Dream, had become a personal matter.

“The President is considered to be a traitor,” he said. “I don’t think the President wanted a conflict but to be loyal to Ivanishvili is a condition of the Georgian Dream coalition but Margvelashvili decided to be independent and to be a protector of the constitution.”

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(News report from Issue No. 324, published on April 13 2017)

Priest accuses Georgia of unfair trial

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APRIL 13 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Archpriest Giorgi Mamaladze, the priest waiting for his trial on charges of attempting to poison a senior member of Patriach Ilia II’s inner circle, has said that he is going to apply to the European Court for Human Rights against what he has said is an unfair process. Archpriest Mamaladze was arrested this year trying to board a flight to Germany with cyanide, a case that has captivated the Georgian public.

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(News report from Issue No. 324, published on April 13 2017)

Armenia’s Republican party wins the election

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YEREVAN, APRIL 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Republican Party of President Serzh Sargsyan was confirmed as the winner of a parliamentary election in Armenia on April 2.

Armenia’s Central Election Commission said the Republican party had won just under 50% of the vote (55 seats), the generally pro-government Tsarukyan Alliance won 27% of the vote (30 seats), the opposition Way Out Alliance nearly 8% (9 seats) and the pro-government Armenian Revolutionary Federation 6.6% (7 seats).

No other political bloc passed the 7% threshold to win seats or the 5% threshold needed to be breached by an individual political party in an election that was marked by alleged vote buying. There were no reports of the protests that had been expected.

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(News report from Issue No. 324, published on April 13 2017)

Kyrgyz Supreme court backs Tekebaev detention

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MARCH 29 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court upheld the detention of opposition leader Omurbek Tekebaev who was arrested when he tried to enter the country in February. The authorities have accused Mr Tekebaev, who is a leader in the Ata Meken party, of bribe-taking and fraud. His detention sparked off anti-government street demonstrations in Bishkek and in the south of the country. Also in Kyrgyzstan, the security services confirmed that it had charged another senior member of the Ata Meken party, acting chairman Almambet Shykmamatov, with fraud while he was an auditor at the State Accounting Chamber in 2011.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Tajik president’s son gets elected into city assembly

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APRIL 2 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The son of Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon, Rustam Emomali, was officially voted in as a deputy in Dushanbe’s city assembly. The vote allows Mr Emomali to take over as mayor of Dushanbe, a move that marks yet another shift rise for a man analysts have said is being groomed to take over the top job from his father. In January, Mr Rakhmon appointed his son to be the acting mayor of Dushanbe, but he could only become the permanent mayor after he had been elected to the city’s assembly. He had previously been head of the government’s anti-corruption unit and head of Tajikistan’s football federation.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Armenia’s new constitution

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APRIL 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> Armenia has just held a parliamentary election that many observers have said is its most important since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Why?

>> The parliamentary election on April 2 was the first since a referendum in December 2015 that changed the constitution and shifted the balance of power away from the President to the PM and parliament. The constitutional changes don’t actually come into effect until President Serzh Sargysan finishes his second and final term in office next year, but the point is that the parliament elected this month will have more power than any other in Armenia’s independence.

>> What are the main changes in the constitution?

>> Whereas neighbouring Georgia shifted some power to parliament in constitutional changes in 2010, Armenia went the whole hog and will move from a presidential system to a parliamentary one. The president is to become a figurehead with no decision-making powers. Direct elections for the president will also be scrapped, parliament will instead pick him or her. Instead, the PM will be the head of the military, will appoint ministers and will set the various policies. Previously, the President had controlled all the major decisions, including appointing the PM.

>> So why were the changes controversial?

>> There the suspicion that Sargsyan and his allies were trying to tie up power for themselves. Sargsyan is obliged to stand down as President at the end of his second term. The opposition said that he would then try to become PM to retain all his power. We’ll have to wait and see on this. It was certainly convenient for Sargsyan that only his allies and appointees sat on the commission to draft the new constitution and also that it doesn’t come into force until the end of his second term.

>> How has Parliament changed with the new constitution?

>> The number of deputies is being cut to 101 directly elected, down from 131, with four seats being given to ethnic minorities. The 101 seats will also be elected wholly through a system of proportional representation. A second round vote has also been introduced to ensure that the winning party has a parliamentary majority. Opposition members have criticised the reforms as undemocratic but the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s constitutional watchdog, gave the changes a qualified thumbs up.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Kyrgyz opposition in jail attempts suicide

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APRIL 2 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyz opposition leaders demanded an investigation into wounds found on Sadyr Japarov, a former MP who was detained last month after he arrived back in Kyrgyzstan after four years of self- imposed exile. Mr Japarov, who has been detained on suspicion of involvement in various financial crimes, was found with cuts to his neck which the authorities have said were self-inflicted during a suicide attempt. In March hundreds of Mr Japarov’s supporters had clashed with police in Bishkek. Mr Japarov is one of several opposition leaders who have been arrested.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Sweden’s Telia scraps deal to sell Tajik mobile network

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DUSHANBE, MARCH 31 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Telia, the Swedish telecoms company, accused Tajikistan’s government of effectively blocking the $39m sale of mobile unit Tcell to the Aga Khan, an accusation that will undermine Western business confidence in the country.

The Tajik government’s anti- monopoly agency failed to respond to a request to approve the Tcell deal before a deadline set by Telia, forcing it to void the sale of its 60% stake in the company to the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED).

In a statement, Emil Nilsson, head of the Eurasia region for Telia, said that the company had now written off the value of Tcell’s assets, which it put at $13m, although it was still looking for an alternative buyer.

“We have taken all relevant actions in trying to close the deal. The proposed buyer of our interest in Tcell, AKFED, is an established investor in the region with multiple companies in its current portfolio and a long history in Tcell,” he said. “We are now assessing alternative ownership solutions for Tcell.”

Neither the Tajik government nor the Aga Khan have commented.

Telia has been looking to sell its units in Central Asia and the South Caucasus after a corruption probe in 2012/3 discovered it had paid a bribe of several hundred million dollars five years earlier to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan’s then president Islam Karimov, in exchange for market access. Karimov died last year and Ms Karimova has been under house arrest in Tashkent since 2014.

The corruption scandal tarnished Telia’s reputation in the region. Netherlands-based MTS and Norway’s Telenor were also mired in the bribe-paying controversy.

Afterwards, in a damming indictment for companies operating in the region, Telia said the business environment in Central Asia was too riddled through with corruption that reputational damage was inevitable. It was better, the company had concluded, to sell its stakes in Tcell, Kcell (Kazakhstan), Ucell (Uzbekistan), Azercell (Azerbaijan) and Geocell (Georgia) than to risk more reputational damage.

The Aga Khan already owned a 40% stake in Tcell and had agreed to buy Telia’s stake in September last year.

In January, though, Telia accused the Tajik government of trying to pressure it into paying an unmerited tax bill and in February it said it had asked the anti-monopoly unit for a meeting to discuss why it hadn’t yet approved the deal with the Aga Khan.

A Conway Bulletin correspondent in Dushanbe confirmed that the Tcell network was operating as normal.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

Georgian court jails Ex-MP for property Ponzi scam

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TBILISI, APRIL 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi sent the high-profile sisters Maia Rcheulishvili and Rusudan Kervalishvili to four years in prison for embezzlement linked to their construction company Center Point Group.

In a court case that gripped Georgia, the once glamorous sisters who had it all were told they had swindled 6,200 families out of $14m by promising them that they would build the homes of their dreams.

Instead many investors got nothing.

After the judgement, though, there was outrage from some families who said the sisters had gotten off lightly and that the real amount they had embezzled in an elaborate Ponzi scheme was far greater. In 2012, Transparency International, the anti- corruption lobby group, produced a report which said they had stolen $310m.

The judge said that the scam ran from 1999, when the Center Point Group was established, until it went bankrupt in 2008. Its assets were then moved to a company called Dexus in a deal in 2010 that observers have described as murky.

Center Point Group was notorious for collecting large advance payments from clients on promises to build luxury apartments. Hundreds said they never received their apartments.

For Ms Kervalishvili, prison represents a sharp fall from grace. She was once regarded as one of the richest and most successful businesswomen in the country. She had been an MP for former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement party and Parliament’s deputy speaker in 2008-12.

M Rcheulishvili’s husband is Vakhtang Rcheulishvili who was the former head of the Georgian Socialist party and a deputy speaker of Parliament in the 1990s and 2000s.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)

US Senators want Trump Azerbaijan deal probe

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MARCH 30 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — US Senators asked for an official investigation into a hotel deal US President Donald Trump made in Azerbaijan which they suspect may have exposed him, indirectly, to illegal contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The deal, made before Mr Trump became US President earlier this year, involved Anar Mammadov, son of Ziya Mammadov. Ziya Mammadov used to be Azerbaijan’s transport minister and one of the most powerful people in the country. He had a reputation, though, for corruption and also for being linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

As well as possibly being tarnished by association with corruption allegations linked to the Mammadovs, Mr Trump may also have indirectly exposed himself to dealing with the Iran Revolutionary Guard, an organisation still covered by US sanctions. The Senators requested the investigation via the Senate’s Foreign Relations, Banking, and Judiciary committees which then sent on the request to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and FBI director, James Comey. They have yet to respond.

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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)