FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian energy company LukOil said that along with a consortium headed by South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering it had won a contract to build a gas processing plant in the Kandym region of south Uzbekistan. LukOil did not say how much the project would cost but it did say that it was its largest investment in Uzbekistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Azerbaijan have brought new charges against RFE/RL reporter Khadija Ismayilova, media reported. Ms Ismayilova, a critic of the government, is in pre-trial detention for coaxing a journalist into a suicide attempt. She will now also face charges of tax evasion and embezzlement.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The French authorities have seized properties worth millions of euros belonging to Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbek president Islam Karimov, media reported. One of the properties was an estate near Paris which had its own opera house. Ms Karimova, once a potential presidential successor, is under house arrest in Tashkent.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan’s president Emomali Rakhmon sacked the managing-director at TALCO, the company that runs its aluminium smelter, media reported. No official reason was given for sacking Sadriddin Sharipov from TALCO which generates around 70% of Tajikistan’s foreign earnings.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 11 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tengizchevroil, a Kazakh joint-venture with Chevron, is expected to boost oil output by 42% to 38m tonnes by 2021, Kazakh energy minister Vladimir Shkolnik said. This is important news for Kazakhstan as Tengizchevroil is its biggest single oil producer.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
>>Criticism comes after Russia cuts Turkmen gas imports>>
FEB. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmenistan has criticised Russia as an unreliable gas partner, hinting that it was moving away from its traditional energy alliance with Moscow and was instead looking for new clients and markets.
Ties between Turkmenistan and Russia have been increasingly strained and, perhaps, the Kremlin’s shadow boxing with the West in eastern Ukraine persuaded it to issue the harshly worded statement and speed up its search for new clients.
“Gazprom and its affiliates periodically violate agreements at interstate, intergovernmental and interdepartmental level, leading to the view that unfortunately the major energy company is an unstable partner,” the AFP news agency reported quoting an article on the website of Turkmenistan’s oil and gas ministry.
Earlier this year, Gazprom said that it was cutting imports of gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan by up to two-thirds.
Like other countries in the region, Turkmenistan has been trying to deal with the fallout from the decline in the value of the rouble and also the fall in energy prices. President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has ordered his energy executives to search for more clients.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Oil output in Azerbaijan rose for the first time in a year, Reuters quoted an Azerbaijani official as saying. The official, who declined to be named, said the increase was due to a rise in production at the ACG fields operated by BP.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Gagik Tsarikian, head of the opposition Prosperous Armenia Party, has accused the government of harassing his staff and sacking police tasked with defending his property, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. Mr Tsarikian said President Serzh Sargsyan ordered the tax police to close his operations.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
>>Dollar being dropped to counter oil price slip>>
FEB. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan plans to scrap its currency peg to the dollar to ease the impact of falling oil prices, Azerbaijani Central Bank chief, Elman Rustamov, said in an interview with the Financial Times.
The comments appeared to trigger a reaction on the street. Bulletin correspondents reported long queues forming outside exchange booths in Baku the day after the interview was published. People were anticipating another currency devaluation and were trying to exchange their Azerbaijani manat into US dollars.
Like other countries in the region, Azerbaijan has been trying to deal with the fallout from Russia’s tumbling rouble and the decline in oil prices.
One of the major side-effects of the economic turmoil has been an increase in inflation, as Mr Rustamov pointed out in the interview.
“It is critical to make some kind of corrections to fiscal and monetary policy,” he said. “We consider that we should transit to a more flexible exchange rate regime and gradually we will transit to an inflation-targeting regime.”
He didn’t say when the US dollar peg would be dropped but he did say that the new basket would hold more Euros, reflecting more accurately Azerbaijan’s trade make-up. Economists said they expected a gradual decline in the value of the manat of around 1% every month.
And people in Baku are becoming increasingly concerned about economic instability.
Mahammad Qasimli, 57, a school teacher said he was concerned hyperinflation from the mid-1990s may return.
“Every time when there is economic turmoil, the poor suffer the most,” he said.”
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
FEB. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s security services have uncovered 30 more attempts by the radical group IS to recruit young disaffected Kyrgyz men for their army in Syria, the US-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported quoting the government. The authorities also said an imam at a large mosque had been arrested for supporting IS.
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(News report from Issue No. 219, published on Feb. 18 2015)
