OCT. 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – China’s football coach Gao Hongbo resigned after his team lost 2-0 to Uzbekistan in a World Cp qualifier match. Mr Gao had returned to coaching China this year, after a two-year stint in 2009- 2011. In September, Uzbekistan was ranked in the top-50 national teams in the FIFA ranking.
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(News report from Issue No. 300, published on Oct. 14 2016)
OCT. 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Baku released Javid Huseynov, an Azerbaijani international football player jailed at the end of May for links to the killing of a journalist in 2015. Initially sentenced to four years in prison for obstructing justice, Mr Huseynov was freed after an appeal. A group of people linked to Mr Huseynov beat Rasim Aliyev, a journalist, to death after he had criticised Mr Huseynov’s behaviour.
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(News report from Issue No. 300, published on Oct. 14 2016)
OCT. 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The management of Azerbaijan’s Formula One city circuit said they want to change the name of Baku’s grand prix race. Formula One held its first race in Azerbaijan in June, under the European Grand Prix moniker which has previously been assigned to races not fixed to specific geographic area. Azerbaijan, which sees sport as a way of promoting its brand, wants to rename the race as the Azerbaijani Grand Prix, in the style of most of the other races.
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(News report from Issue No. 299, published on Oct. 7 2016)
OCT. 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – US golf champion Jack Nicklaus flew to Ashgabat to meet with Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov to discuss designing Turkmenistan’s first golf course. Mr Nicklaus’s company, Nicklaus Design, has mulled building a golf course in Turkmenistan, near the border with Iran, for the past couple of years.
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(News report from Issue No. 299, published on Oct. 7 2016)
SEPT. 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA), majority owned by the government, signed a promotional deal with Italian football club Juventus, continuing Azerbaijan’s strategy of using sport to promote itself.
Juventus released a photo of its executives meeting IBA officials in Baku, posing with one of its famous black and white shirts.
Under the terms of the deal, the value of which has not been announced, IBA will be able to use Juventus logos and branding to promote its products. Juventus will also be committed to opening and running a football academy in Baku.
Juventus’ head of global partnerships and corporate revenues Giorgio Ricci said that the deal with IBA was the fifth regional sponsorship deal that the club had concluded in the last 16 months.
“We are proud to be working in a country of great potential such as Azerbaijan, and to collaborate with an organisation as prestigious as the International Bank of Azerbaijan,” he said.
For IBA, the timing is less auspicious. Azerbaijan’s economy has been under pressure because of a sharp fall in oil prices and analysts have said it will fall into a recession for the first time since 2009.
Banks have in particular come under pressure because of their previous loose lending arrangements which have now generated mountains of bad debt. This bad debt portfolio was exacerbated by a 50% fall in the value of the manat last year.
In July, a court in Azerbaijan also convicted IBA’s former CEO, Jahangir Hajiyev, of money laundering.
Sport, though, has become an important outlet for Azerbaijan to market itself. Azerbaijan had sponsored Spanish team Atletico Madrid and Baku is one of the 13 host cities for Euro 2020 football tournament.
The Azerbaijani government owns a 55% stake in IBA. IBA accounts for around 60% of all lending in Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 297, published on Sept. 23 2016)
SEPT. 14 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The International Tennis Federation banned for life two Uzbek officials for betting offences. The two officials, Sherzod Hasanov and Arkhip Molotyagin,communicated via mobile phone the scores of games they were officiating to a third party, before recording them into the official electronic score- board, allowing illegal betting.
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(News report from Issue No. 296, published on Sept. 16 2016)
AUG. 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — At the Olympics in Rio, Uzbekistan won four gold medals, including three in boxing. Kazakhstan once again pulled in a decent haul, winning three golds, including a first ever swimming win, five silvers and nine bronzes. Tajikistan also won its first gold medal since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Dilshod Nazarov won gold in the hammer, becoming an instant national hero in Tajikistan. In the South Caucasus, Azerbaijan won a gold medal in taekwondo, Georgia won golds in wrestling and weightlifting and Armenia won a wrestling gold, its first for 20 years.
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(News report from Issue No. 293, published on Aug. 29 2016)
JULY 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Manchester United finalised the £26m ($33.7m) signing of Armenia’s Henrikh Mkhitaryan, a deal that puts Armenian football at the forefront of the planned renaissance of one of England’s most famous and most successful clubs.
Mkhitaryan, 27, will be the first Armenian player to play in the English Premier League, widely credited with being the most competitive football league in the world, and only the second player from the South Caucasus. Georgi Kinkladze, a Georgian midfielder whose dribbling skills left opposition players flat-footed, played for Manchester City in the Premier League in the 1995/6 season.
Unveiling Mkhitaryan at Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground, manager Jose Mourinho said that his new attacking midfielder will make an immediate impact.
“Henrikh is a real team player with great skill, vision and also has a good eye for goal,” he said.
Mourinho, who took over as the Manchester United manager in the summer, has been given the task of rebuilding the team after they finished fifth last season, missing out on a place in the UEFA Champions League, Europe’s top club football competition.
Mkhitaryan, who had played in Germany for Borussia Dortmund, said it was a dream come true.
“I am excited to play for a club with such an illustrious history and hope to be part of it for a long time,” he said.
Mkhitaryan was born in Yerevan in 1989. His father was Hamlet Mkhi taryan, one of the most prolific Armenian strikers in the 1980s. Mkhitaryan is now considered one of the best Armenian players and has won international 59 caps, the first when he was 17-years-old, and scored 19 goals.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
JUNE 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Azerbaijani and Uzbek weightlifting teams are both facing a ban from competing in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer after their athletes failed a series of drugs test, media reported. Weightlifters from Russia and Kazakhstan have already received a ban.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – German driver Nico Rosberg won the first F1 Grand Prix in Baku. President Ilham Aliyev wanted to host the Grand Prix to boost the profile of Azerbaijan. His critics, though, accused him of wasting money and hosting an expensive vanity project while Azerbaijan’s economy shrinks.
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(News report from Issue No. 286, published on June 24 2016)