JUNE 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Kazakhstan arrested Sulambek Barkinkhoyev, the managing-director of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s flagship EXPO-2017 event, on suspicion of corruption. The arrest came a few days after police also arrested Mr Barkinkhoyev’s boss on corruption allegations.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russia’s parliament ratified a security deal with the Georgian rebel region of South Ossetia which will see Russian soldiers stationed permanently in the region. Although the deal is symbolic, as Russian soldiers have been posted in S.Ossetia since the end of a 2008 war, it still rankled Georgia.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The number of cars imported into Azerbaijan dropped by around 50% in the first five months of the year, media reported quoting official statistics.
Between January and May, 13,912 passenger cars were imported into the country, down from 27,444 during the same period last year.
The slump in car imports into Azerbaijan is probably a result of a number of factors.
These include a general economic downturn in the region, linked to a recession in Russia and a drop in oil and gas prices. Russia’s economy drives the former Soviet region and oil and gas is the mainstay of Azerbaijan’s economy.
Also, earlier this year Azerbaijan devalued its manat currency by a third, making imports more expensive.
And in 2014, the Azerbaijani government passed a law which banned car imports not using the higher grade Euro-4 fuel type.
This meant that many older cars from Europe could no longer be imported into Azerbaijan.
The knock on effect of this slump in demand is hitting car prices in Azerbaijan too, economist Vugar Bayramov told the azernews.az website.
He said that as inflation has picked up in Azerbaijan, it has pushed up the price of a new cars but the value for older cars has fallen. “Our monitoring shows that the prices of old cars decreased by 7%,” he said.
Mr Bayramov also said that banks in Azerbaijan had also tightened their finance requirements for cars, requiring a downpayment for financing of 50%, up from 20% earlier.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The number of migrant workers travelling from Tajikistan to Russia fell by 15% during the first half of the year, according to data from the ministry of labour.
The statistics, which run from January to mid-June 2015, showed that about 315,000 workers travelled from Tajikistan to Russia to find work, 52,000 less than in 2014.
Most have been put off by the drop in Russian economic output, which has knocked job opportunities.
Tajik labour migration to Kazakhstan, though, has increased by 33%, although the absolute numbers are small in comparison with Russia. The data showed that 4,800 workers from Tajikistan had travelled to Kazakhstan to find work, up from 1,200 in 2014.
Remittances from migrant workers are key to Tajikistan’s economy. A World Bank report forecast a 40% drop in remittances to Tajikistan this year because of the poor state of the Russian economy and the collapse of the Tajik somoni.
The new ministry of labour data adds credence to this worsening economic picture.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – An interview with an alleged British tourist in Azerbaijan has triggered allegations of forgery. The interview, broadcast on domestic Azerbaijani TV, showed a man who introduced himself as James Bonar speaking broken English. “It is fantasy,” he said when asked of Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan’s ambassador in Delhi, Parahat Durdyev, said that the countries developing the so-called TAPI pipeline what will pump Turkmen gas to the Indian sub-continent will choose their consortium partners by the start of September.
The Kremlin-linked Sputnik news agency quoted Mr Durdyev as saying: “By September 1, the government of Turkmenistan [is] committed to producing the final results of the selection of a consortium and the leader of the consortium.”
TAPI is one of the biggest and most ambitious energy projects in the world. Construction work hasn’t yet started on the 1,650km pipeline which will cross Afghanistan and Pakistan but international organisations such as the World Bank have said that they support the plan.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan banned poultry imports from neighbouring Iran after a reported outbreak of bird flu, media reported quoting a government official who works in the ministry of agriculture’s veterinary department. Iran reported bird flu in the north of the country this month.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenia’s parliament approved a $150m loan from the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) to build a north-south motorway across the country. The EBD is headquartered in Almaty and is bankrolled mainly by Russia and Kazakhstan. It concentrates on member states of the Kremlin-led Eurasian Economic Union.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – YEREVAN — Armenia’s government wants to change the way it measures its national debt, a con trick, its opponents have said, which is aimed at massaging the numbers by cutting out the Central Bank’s borrowings.
The Armenian parliament passed a first reading of a bill which will ditch the current state debt and instead measure the national debt.
Atom Janjughazyan, deputy finance minister, said the change was needed to meet international standards.
“The sole purpose of the bill is to improve the financial statistics of the State in accordance with international practice,” he said in parliament.
But opposition MPs said the change was merely a cover for allowing the government to borrow so that it can ease itself out of the current financial downturn, triggered by a fall in the Russian economy, the main economic driver for the former Soviet Union.
And this viewpoint appears to be backed by international economists. Teresa Daban Sanchez, the IMF representative in Armenia, told an Armenian newspaper the country’s external debt is now uncomfortable.
“The government needs to take measures so that the debt against the GDP index begins to fall,” she said.
Armenia’s government has previously said it will borrow to prop itself up through the current economic downturn. Under government rules its debt must be below 60% of GDP.
Mr Janjughazyan, the deputy finance minister, said under the new system, Armenia’s debt measured $4.4b against a GDP of $10.9m, comfortably below the 60% mark.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US Congress said that its ethics committee was investigating whether SOCAR, the Azerbaijani state-owned energy company, paid for a 2013 trip to Baku for 10 congressmen and 32 staff members.
Congress’ rules ban foreign governments paying for overseas trips. All the Congressmen implicated in the investigation deny any wrong-doing and have said that they were unaware that SOCAR had paid for their trips to a conference in Baku.
The Houston Chronicle reported that the focus of the investigation are hundreds of thousands of dollars paid out by SOCAR to two Texas-based non-profit organisations which then paid for trips to Baku.
Azerbaijan’s lobbying techniques have attracted more and more criticism over the past few years.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
