Author Archives: admin

Gazprom Armenia applies discount

APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Gazprom Armenia, the Russian owned gas distributor, said it will apply to the country’s regulator to lower consumer prices by 6%. The discount will be limited to households that consume 10,000 cubic metres of gas a year, the company said. Earlier this month, Gazprom said it would give the Armenian government a 9% discount on the gas it supplies.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Tajik government tightens NGO laws

APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Tajik government passed a law that forces NGOs to report to the authorities any grants received in the past 10 days. In mid- 2015, Tajikistan amended its law on NGOs with the stated objective of tracking funding for potential terrorist activity. There has been a general move in Central Asia towards tightening regulations of funding for NGOs. The authorities have said that is to crackdown on extremists and criminals, but others have said this is aimed at reducing foreign influence over NGOs and curtailing their independence.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Kyrgyz police raids Centerra

APRIL 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Toronto-listed miner Centerra Gold said that Kyrgyz police have raided the Bishkek offices of its wholly owned Kumtor Gold Company, reigniting a vicious row that has involved the miner and the government. For years, Centerra and the government have rowed about ownership of the Kumtor gold mine. Kumtor accounts for around 7% of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP and is the country’s largest industrial asset.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

US prosecutors finally name Uzbek Pres. daughter in corruption probe

APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US named Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, as the beneficiary of bribes worth $550m taken between 2007 and 2013 from telecoms companies wanting access to the Uzbek market.

This was the first time that Ms Karimova, 43, has been named in connection with the corruption case since news of the deals became public three years ago.

It’s also a reminder of just how tightly President Karimov and his family ran Uzbekistan, seemingly viewing it as their personal fiefdom, and how telecoms companies, from Sweden’s TeliaSonera to US-listed VimpelCom, had to bribe their way into the market of 30m people.

TeliaSonera rebranded as Telia Company earlier this month. Both Telia and VimpelCom are the subject of investigations in the corruption cases. Telia is also trying to sell off its subsidiaries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

A Bloomberg News report from New York said that prosecutors had named Ms Karimova after previous requests to recover cash, which they said had been laundered, were ignored.

“Prosecutors made the request in a letter to a Manhattan federal court judge on Thursday (April 21), saying Karimova and the group failed to respond to a civil forfeiture complaint against three bank accounts,” Bloomberg reported.

Ms Karimova had previously only been referred to, rather obliquely, as: “Government Official A, a close relative of a high-ranking Uzbek government official.”

Being named in the reports will bring further international notoriety on Ms Karimova.

She had once been spoken of as a future leader of Uzbekistan, a label she appeared to wear lightly while she produced pop videos, hosted fashion shows and concocted her own perfume range.

Now Ms Karimova has disappeared from public sight, having been placed under house arrest in Tashkent two years ago.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Tajik Nurek needs cash injection

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon said that modernisation work at the Nurek hydropower plant needed an additional 4.7b somoni (around $600 million). The government has worked on the modernisation of the plant with the World Bank. The Nurek station has a total capacity of 3,000 MW and produces over 70% of Tajikistan’s electricity.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Tajikistan distributes jobs for in-laws

APRIL 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Amonullo Sadulloyev, the brother- in-law of Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon, was made chief of Southern Electric Networks, a power distribution company based in Kurgan-Tube. Last August, Mr Sadulloyev was sacked as the deputy director at the national power distributor Barqi Tojik. Transparency activists have criticised Tajikistan for its perceived nepotism.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Editorial: Kazakh capital’s lake

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A stinky lake is apparently keeping Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev awake at night.

This week, he reprimanded the mayor of Astana, Adilbek Dzhaksybekov for his inability to get rid of a stench emanating from the Taldykol lake, just behind Nazarbayev University’s shiny new buildings.

Everything in Astana must be pristine, all the more because next year Kazakhstan’s capital will host EXPO-2017, an occasion for Mr Nazarbayev to project a prosperous image for his country.

If Mr Dzhaksybekov cannot clean up the air near Taldykol, Mr Nazarbayev threatened to have him transferred in a yurt on the lakeshore.

Mr Nazarbayev has grown increasingly wary of excessive government spending, as the regional economic downturn hit the country hard. For the first time in more than a decade, the country’s GDP might shrink in 2016.

Public shaming is not unusual in Kazakhstan and state television is not adverse to showing Mr Nazarbayev bashing sheepish officials, who, terrified, have to listen to the veteran leader’s rantings.

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(Editorial from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Azerbaijan’s oil exports drop

APRIL 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Oil exports from Azerbaijan’s state- owned energy company SOCAR shrank by 10% in 2015 compared to 2014. In 2015, SOCAR exported 22.1m tonnes of oil, out of total country exports of 35.2m tonnes. Its share of Azerbaijan’s oil exports also fell from 70% in 2014 to 63% last year.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

US prosecutors names Karimova “the most hated person in Uzbekistan”

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Once feted as a future Uzbek leader, and with an obvious taste for the limelight, Gulnara Karimova’s fall from grace has been sharp.

At the peak of her power and influence, she ran Uzbekistan’s top industrial conglomerate, Zeromax, owned the country’s biggest football team and was the Uzbek envoy to the United Nations in Geneva.

In her spare time, Ms Karimova designed clothes, developed perfume ranges for her own fashion label and produced whimsical music videos which starred, as a backing singer, French actor Gerard Depardieu, now more famous for drunken brawls on aeroplanes and for embracing former Soviet leaders shunned by the West.

But, despite the glamour, Googoosha, a nickname given to Ms Karimova by her father and mockingly adopted by ordinary Uzbeks, was described as the most hated person in the country.

A 2005 cable from the US embassy in Tashkent said that ordinary Uzbeks considered Ms Karimova to be “greedy and power hungry.”

“She remains the single most hated person in the country,” the author of the cable, then-ambassador Jon Purnell, wrote.

Since 2014, though, she has disappeared from public view, apparently incarcerated in a house in Tashkent. An international corruption scandal focused on payments made by mobile phone companies for access to Uzbekistan and an internal power struggle appear to have undermined Ms Karimova.

Pictures of her pleading with her guards and looking thin and drawn leaked out about a year ago, but little else has been seen or heard. Few ordinary Uzbeks care, though.

Eric McGlinchey, a professor at George Mason University, said that her public opulence had been the real reason behind her downfall.

“She wasn’t a quiet crook. She pursued a grotesquely extravagant lifestyle and that made her detested among both the ruling class and ordinary Uzbeks,” he said.

“Were she merely a quiet crook, revelations of hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore accounts could be overlooked.”

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Kazakhstan’s $1 stores profit in tough economic times

ALMATY, APRIL 26 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — A chain of shops touting themselves as ‘$1 stores’ has opened up in Kazakhstan, one of the few retailers apparently prospering during an increasingly vicious economic downturn.

The stores, which operate under the Russian franchise Odna Tsena, carry a classic pared-back budget look and only sell products for 300 tenge (90 cents). Under the slogan “Buy without stress!”, they sell everything from washing up liquid and toilet rolls, to processed food and toys.

And they are busy. On a midweek trip to Odna Tsena, which means One Price, in Almaty, a Bulletin correspondent spoke to four shoppers. They were all women and all appreciated the shop’s discount value.

Nataliya said that she visited the shop almost weekly.

“There is a lot of choice, it’s very comfortable. I usually buy plates and dishes and some toys for my child,” she said. “Compared to other shops it is much better.”

This store opened in December 2015, in the middle of an economic storm which has forced a 50% devaluation of the tenge, pushed up inflation to levels not seen since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/9 and pressured cost-cutting companies to scrap thousands of jobs.

Across the world, discount stores have tended to prosper during the tougher times and Odna Tsena is bullish about its own prospects.

Botagoz Tlemisova, a director at Odna Tsena, said that the chain planned to open 50 more stores across Kazakhstan in the next three years.

“We’ve been operating for just a few months, but already we’ve seen the loyalty of our customers. Our research has shown that more than 50% of shoppers come back to our shops every two to three weeks,” she told media.

In the Almaty shop, Svetlana said she had popped in because she had heard about the knock-down prices.

“I am surprised that everything here has one price, and it is cheap. It is very relevant nowadays when prices are rising on everything,” she said. She also said she would return soon.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)