NOV. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan expects its economy to grow by 1% in 2017 and 1.5% in 2018, a draft budget from the government seen by Reuters showed. The day before, the World Bank reiterated that it expected the economy to contract by 3% this year. Azerbaijan has been particularly hard hit by falling oil prices. Its economy is particularly oil-dependent.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — London-listed investment holding BGEO posted a 24% growth in revenues in Q3, compared to the same period last year. BGEO’s main assets are Bank of Georgia and Georgia Healthcare Group (GHG). GHG accounted for the group’s largest growth rate. In the first nine months of the year, GHG posted revenues for 290.4m lari ($116.6), up 64.8% from 2015.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Uzbek authorities freed from prison 72-year-old Samandar Kukanov, described by human rights groups as one of the country’s longest surviving political prisoners. Human rights activist also said that the authorities in Uzbekistan had released Tohar Haydarov, a convert to Christianity, who was jailed in 2000 on drug related charges. Mr Kukanov, who opposed former president Islam Karimov, was imprisoned for 20 years in 1994 on embezzlement charges. This sentence was extended by two years in 2004. The release of Mr Kukanov may have been timed to soften acting president Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s image before an election on Dec. 4.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
ALMATY/TARAZ, Kazakhstan, NOV. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A stubborn, painful economic downturn has wiped 4% off the average Kazakhs’ purchasing power, the ranking.kz website reported, forcing people to cut out luxury items — especially those imported from abroad.
Aiganym Dosmail, who works in an advertising agency in Almaty, said that she had cut out on buying luxury items that had been imported and ballooned in price since the devaluation of the tenge last year.
“I optimise my spending. Previously, I bought a lot of unnecessary stuff and now I buy only those goods that last long and are good quality. It is of course sad that previously marsh- mallows cost 300 tenge and now they cost 800 tenge,” she told the Bulletin.
The tenge lost half its value last year after the government reluctantly cut its peg to the US dollar. Low oil prices and a recession in Russia had pressured the Kazakh economy, and others across the region, into currency devaluations and budget cuts.
Worst hit are importers of luxury goods. Most Kazakhs now can’t afford to buy the foreign goods that they could afford even a year earlier.
Unlike Ms Dosmail, Aigerim Zhanuzak’s hairdressing salon in Taraz in the south of the country has been far less affected. She said that most of her clients are self-styled middle class Kazakhs and that she hasn’t had to put up her costs because she doesn’t have may import costs.
“My salon is targeting middle income and higher class people which means the crisis doesn’t impact people when it comes to personal comfort. People always want to eat and lto ook good,” she said. “If we talk about the financial crisis in our town then it has hit the lower-income population. Goods have become more expensive, public transport as well, but salaries have not increased, unfortunately.”
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s economy is virtually broken and needs major reform if it is going to survive, the country’s new PM Karen Karapetyan told Bloomberg in an interview.
Parachuted into the job in September after a series of crises pushed trust and credibility in the previous PM to near breaking point, Mr Karapetyan is the former Gazprom executive and former mayor of Yerevan, who President Serzh Sargsyan has tasked with transforming the Armenian economy.
Corruption and the dominance of a handful of well-connected oligarchs, who control most of the lucrative import businesses, need to be countered, Mr Karapetyan said.
“We’re proposing the most rapid change that’s possible,” he said. “We will create an even, competitive, level- playing field.”
And the ruling Republican party needs to do something fairly radical if it is going to have any chance of holding on to parliament after an election in May. In July this year, hundreds of young Armenians clashed with police in support of a group of gunmen who had captured a police station, highlighting frustration with the government.
In the interview, Mr Karapetyan also said that he wanted to cut government spending to halve the state deficit, a difficult objective if you also need to win votes.
“We also have external debt growing faster than the GDP growth and growing faster than revenues,’’ he said.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Veolia and French rival Saur had been the two major bidders for a contract to unite Armenia’s water supply and sewage systems under one operator.
Prior to Veolia’s victory in the tender, the two companies had been evenly matched.
Veolia operates Yerevan Djur which supplies 1.1m people living in Armenia’s capital with water and waste services.
Since 2014, Saur has operated Armenian WSC, Lori WSC, Shirak WSC and Nor Akunk WSC which supply water and sewage services to 1m people.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Australian miner White Cliff said it had successfully drilled new holes in the quartz zone of its Aucu mine in Kyrgyzstan, recovering high grade ores that yielded significant gold and copper volumes. White Cliff owns a 89% stake in Aucu, which is located 350km west of Bishkek.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan will privatise the International Bank of Azerbaijan, the country’s largest lender, in the first half of 2017, Rufat Aslanli, chairman of Azerbaijan’s financial supervisory agency, said. Azerbaijan’s ministry of finance owns 54.9% and the government- owned credit company Aqrar Kredit owns 27% in IBA. IBA accounts for around 60% of all lending in Azerbaijan.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s troublesome Caspian Sea oil field Kashagan has finally started producing oil on a commercial basis, Kazakh oil and gas minister Kanat Bozumbayev said in a speech to parliament. The project has been heavily delayed and has run several billion dollars over budget but the news still marks an important bench mark for Kazakhstan which is counting on Kashagan revenues boosting it into the top tier of global oil producers.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> In his interview with Bloomberg, Nazarbayev says that he won’t hand power to his children. What do you think he means by this?
>> If you read the interview closely, it is not as clear as that. He says in the interview that he “doesn’t envisage succession for his children” and that it is “not a question for us”. Instead he says that it is up to the Kazakh people to decide through the constitution. This, of course, means through an election. I think that Nazarbayev has deliberately left this ambiguous. He is certainly not ruling out encouraging one of his two daughters, or their children, to take over form him but he is saving that whoever does will have to win a presidential election to earn legitimacy.
>> So you don’t think it is as clear cut as the Bloomberg headline writers make out. They were definitive and gave the story the headline: ‘Kazakh President Nazarbayev Says Power Won’t Be Family Business’.
>> That’s right. I think that he is leaving his options open, fully open. Of course, he can’t sit there in a Bloomberg interview and say that he favours handing over power to Dariga which, as we have said, is a likely scenario. Instead he has to say that the constitution has to be respected and the people have to decide. This can easily be manipulated to give Nazarbayev the result he wants. He just needs his Nur Otan party to select his chosen candidate and then for an election to pass this off successfully. Don’t forget that Western observers have never judged an election in Kazakhstan to be free fair. This generally means that the Kazakh elite can host can election but still generate the results that they need.
>> Right. So, when the time is right, Nur Otan picks Nazarbayev’s favoured candidate. An election is called which this candidate wins. This means that the constitution has been respected and the people have made their choice. Is that right?
>> That process would certainly fit with the process that Nazarbayev described in his Bloomberg interview. We don’t know who he favours but his interview with Bloomberg, in our view, certainly did not reduce Dariga’s chances of becoming his successor.
>> What else was important to pick up on in the interview?
>> I actually think that it’s important that Nazarbayev said he’d be happy to stay on as president past 2020. This had been the date we’d been expecting him to stand aside, he will be 80-years-old in 2020, but he’s now signalled that he is no rush to sort out the succession issue in Kazakhstan and that he’d be prepared to wait until 2025 or, dare we say it, beyond that to sort out this troublesome issue. I thought that Nazarbayev looked spritely in the interview. For a man of 76, he is clearly in good nick.
>> And, what about his comments on Trump? Surely they were important too?
>> Yes and no. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. He has to welcome Trump as the next US President. All the leaders of the Former Soviet Union do. Hillary Clinton would have meant more of the same, which essentially was poor Russia-US relations souring the whole ex-Soviet space. With Trump it’s a clean slate. Nobody is sure what he is going to do.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
