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Newspaper faces closure in Azerbaijan

JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijani newspaper Azadliq, one of the only independent newspapers in the country, is on the brink of closing because of its worsening financial situation, media lobby groups said. The authorities in Azerbaijan have been clamping down on opposition media. Lobby groups said Azadliq has received arbitrary fines.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Moodys cuts Azerbaijani bank ratings to negative

JUNE 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Moodys, the ratings agency, downgraded Azerbaijan’s banking sector to negative from stable, reflecting the country’s tough economic outlook.

Azerbaijan devalued its currency by a third earlier this year, undermining the
banks, Moodys said.

“We believe that banks’ asset quality will deteriorate following the local-currency devaluation, as most foreign-currency loans in Azerbaijan are to borrowers that do not have foreign-currency revenues,” Moodys said in a report.

Stubbornly high consumer spending and inflation is also pressuring Azerbaijan’s econ- omy.

Based on an average price of a barrel of oil of around $55, Moodys said that Azerbaijan’s economy would grow by 1% this year, one of the slowest growth rates in the developing world.

Oil production dominates Azerbaijan’s economy. Moodys estimated that the hydrocarbon sector contributed around 37% of Azerbaijan’s GDP last years.

Azerbaijan said that is is trying to boost gas sales to Europe but this is not due to come on-stream for several years.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Tajikistan’s Central Bank cuts jobs

JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan’s Central Bank is cutting nearly 200 jobs as it restructures and streamlines its operations, media reported. It’s unclear exactly what the restructuring entails but media said that most jobs would be lost at the Central Bank’s offices in Dushanbe.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

US goes after Uzbek President’s daughter

JULY 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – US prosecutors have opened a case against an unnamed relative of Uzbek president Islam Karimov to regain around $300m paid out in apparent bribes by two Russian telecoms companies, media reported. The unnamed relative is widely thought to be Gulnara Karimova, Mr Karimov’s eldest daughter.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Electricity protests continue in Armenia

JULY 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – YEREVAN — Several hundred protesters continued to occupy a main street in central Yerevan, demonstrating against an electricity price increase.

The number of demonstrators has fallen and a Bulletin correspondent said there were now no more than about 1,000 people protesting on July 2, a drop from an estimated 10,000 protesters last week.

But the stand-off with riot police is still one of the most widely supported street demonstrations in Armenia for years.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, also warned the West against interfering, a sign of the Kremlin’s concern.

The protesters, who are mainly young, have defied police warnings to quit and the atmosphere has veered from tense to party-like over the past week. Last week police used water cannons and detained over 200 protesters when they tried to clear the square.

In a bid to appease the protesters, Armenia’s president Serzh Sargsyan suggested inves- tigating further a request by the Russia-owned electricity monopoly to find out just why the price increases are needed.

“I strongly believe that cancelling the tariff increase is extremely dangerous. Hence, until the given company pro- vides its opinion, the govern- ment will incur the entire burden of the tariff increase,” Mr Sargsyan said.

Most activists, though, dismissed Mr Sargsyan’s offer as a distraction.

“Increasing electricity tariffs will increase nearly all prices. Bread, butter, oil,” one activist at the protest said.

The electricity price rise is the third in two years.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Uzbek President congratulates journalists

JUNE 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Apparently without any sense of irony, Uzbek President Islam Karimov congratulated journalists in Uzbekistan on their work.

It could be said to be ironic because media groups rate Uzbekistan as one of the worst countries in the world for media freedom.

“We are well aware that today it is impossible to imagine life without your difficult and responsible work, without the multifaceted activities of the media,” Mr Karimov wrote in a letter published on the internet.

“The fruits of your painstaking work are always received with great interest and attention.”

There are now 1,400 media outlets in Uzbekistan, he said, including 70 TV stations, 30 radio channels and 300 websites.

Uzbek journalists, at least those without links to the authorities, disagree.

Daniil Kislov, the editor of the Fergana.Ru news agency which covers Central Asia, said: “The president’s impression on the richness of the information space seriously differs from reality. Reporters Without Borders placed Uzbekistan in the 166th position among 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index 2015.”

The Uzbek authorities have blocked access to Ferghana.com in Uzbekistan for several years.

US-funded RFE/RL, the BBC and the Voice of America are inaccessible in Uzbekistan, leaving the local information consumer limited to the government’s position on events.

And this view can be very skewed. Readers relying on government authorised journalism may not be aware of the problems facing Mr Karimov’s eldest daughter, she has been under house arrest for over a year, the arguments surrounding Uzbekistan’s use of child labour to pick its cotton, the general crackdown in civil liberties and, also, its poor media freedom ranking.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Kazakh economy to perform poor growth

JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Economists polled by Bloomberg News said Kazakhstan will be one of the top ten worst performing economies in 2015. Kazakhstan’s economy is expected to grow by 1.2% this year, down from an estimate of 3.6% in March.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Armania’s currency reserves increase

JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenia’s foreign currency reserves increased by $100m in May, the Central Bank told media. The increase shows that pressure on the dram has reduced. Last year, the Central Bank spent a third of its reserves defining the dram.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Turkmen president travels to Tbilisi to talk energy policies

JULY 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – TBILISI — Turkmenistan’s President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov travelled to Tbilisi for the first time in his eight-year presidency, part of a high-profile charm offensive aimed at winning support for pumping Turkmen gas to Europe across the South Caucasus.

Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili welcomed Mr Berdymukhamedov at the Presidential Palace overlooking Tbilisi with red carpet and a guard of honour.

“Energy is one of the issues on which we cooperate closely. A Transit route from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey has a huge potential,” Georgian media quoted Mr Berdymukhamedov as saying after the meeting. said.

Mr Margvelashvili agreed.

“Our joint transit and energy projects will make it possible to transit Turkmen energy resources to the European markets,” he said.

This year momentum has built for Turkmenistan to start sending its gas to Europe across the south Caucasus. The European Union has visited Ashgabat several times to secure promises of gas supplies from Turkmenistan and Turkmen officials have set up working groups with their Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish counterparts on how best to pump gas to Europe.

Europe wants to reduce its dependence on Russia for energy supplies and Turkmenistan wants to widen its client base. Currently most of its gas flows east to China.

By travelling to Tbilisi for the first time since he became Turkmen president in 2007, Mr Berdymukhamedov has sent out a strong signal of his intent.

Luca Anceschi, a professor of Central Asian Studies at Glasgow University explained.

“This meeting, marking Berdymukhamedov’s first official visit to Georgia, is an important display of Turkmenistan’s policy of maintaining an open dialogue with as many potential partners as possible,” he said.

And Georgia is important because it lies on the pipeline transit route from Azerbaijan to Turkey and then into Europe. Mr Berdymukhamedov, as he clearly has acknowledged, needs Georgian support to push gas through to Europe.

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)

Football fever grips Georgian capital and tests infrastructure

TBILISI/Georgia, JULY 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Football dominates conversation on the streets of Tbilisi. Its 51,000-seat Dinamo stadium will host the 40th UEFA Super Cup between Champions League winner Barcelona and Europa League winner Sevilla on August 11.

Tbilisi won the bid to host the Super Cup in the last few months of Mikheil Saakashvili’s government in 2012, the culmination of 1-1/2 years of negotiations.

“It’s a huge event for us,” said Boris Kiknadze, one of several thousand football fans in Tbilisi who are hoping to buy tickets for the big match. “Our teams are not great, so we never have big stars coming here. I am really excited to see Barcelona, if I manage to get a ticket.”

But that’s just the problem. Getting hold of a ticket has proved difficult, if not impossible. “It is a horrible mess here,” said Kiknadze. Biletebi.ge, an online ticket retailer, was selected as the main distributor of the game tickets. Used to selling tickets to jazz concerts and the theatre, rather than large sports events, it crashed seconds after thousands of fans tried to buy a ticket on June 22.

It restarted on June 30, introduced a virtual queue and allowed people 15 minutes on the website before timing out and four tickets per person. An estimated 140,000 people queued online for tickets. About 2,000 tickets were sold before the site crashed again.

Biletebi.ge said it experienced technical difficulties, and resumed sales on July 1 of the 4,300 tickets earmarked for people living outside Georgia. The remaining 22,000 tickets, reserved for Georgians, will be sold later this month at booths outside the stadium.

Tbilisi-based sports journalist Alastair Watt described what the match meant to Georgians.

“This is probably the biggest club match to take place in Georgia since independence (from the Soviet Union in 1991),” he said. “For the tens of thousands of Georgians who follow Barcelona, this is likely to be their only chance to see their team on Georgian soil.”

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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)