JAN. 30 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgia’s economy grew by an estimated 2.2% in 2016, the slowest growth rate since 2009, media reported quoting the statistics service. This was a drop from 2.9% in 2015 and 4.6% in 2014. Georgia, like the rest of the region, has been trying to deal with an economic slowdown linked to a recession in Russia and an overly strong US dollar.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
JAN. 29 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev opened the 28th Winter University Olympiad in Almaty, an event that he said was the biggest sporting event ever held in Kazakhstan. The Olympiad is important to Kazakhstan as a way of promoting itself on the international stage. This year it also hosts EXPO-2017 in Astana, an event it has been planning for years.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
JAN. 31 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In its full year results, Nostrum Oil & Gas, which focuses on Kazakhstan said that it had just beaten its expected output with an average daily output of 40,351/barrels of oil equivalent (boe) compared to an anticipated 40,000 boe. It said that the final quarter of the year had been the best with 44,708 boe.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
JAN. 31 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Caspian Pipeline Consortium plans to invest $150m in 2017 in expanding the capacity of the pipeline that pumps oil from western Kazakhstan around the northern tip of the Caspian Sea to Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, its general director Nikolay Gorban told media. The expansion plan will boost the pipeline’s capacity to 67m tonnes per year, up from 52m tonnes. This is important because CPC is a key export route for Kazakhstan and especially for its important Tengiz field.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
FEB. 1 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Reports have appeared in Kyrgyz media that a cargo plane which crashed into a village next to Manas airport last month was carrying iphones and other electronic equipment in a smuggling operation based at the airport. Eyewitnesses also told the RFE/RL website that some of the first members of the emergency services looted the crash site. “One policeman took off his shirt and filled it with mobile phones,” RFE/RL quoted a young boy as saying.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
JAN. 27 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The CEO of Swedish mobile operator Telia, Johan Dennelind, said that he was confident that he would be able to sell off the company’s remaining assets in its Eurasia region this year. Interest in Telia’s regional asset which include Azercell, Geocell, Ucell, Kcell and Tcell have been light. A corruption scandal in Uzbekistan, linked to a 2008 bribe, triggered the sale.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
ALMATY, FEB 2, 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in western Kazakhstan are trying to intimidate workers into giving up their hunger strikes, the Eurasianet website reported.
The Eurasianet report quoted workers as saying that a breakdown in trust with the authorities was pushing them towards a potentially violent confrontation.
“We cannot allow another Zhanaozen,” Eurasianet quoted a lawyer for a detained union leader as saying. Zhanaozen is the town in western Kazakhstan where police and strikers clashed in 2011. At least 15 people died.
Several hundred oil workers have been refusing to eat in west Kazakhstan in protest over the closure of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions, an umbrella organization, by a court in Shymkent at the beginning of the year. The hunger strikers’ de facto leaders, Amin Yeleusinov, and Nurbek Kushakbaev were arrested on Jan. 20
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
ALMATY, FEB. 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a surprise move, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev sacked his longtime ally Imangali Tasmagambetov as deputy PM and sent him to Moscow to be Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Russia.
The shift from central government to the diplomatic corps is a humiliating end to Mr Tamagambetov’s political career.
He had been a PM, mayor of both Almaty and Astana and also been the minister of defence. The 60-year-old Tasmagambetov is popular with ordinary Kazakhs and had been touted by analysts as a potential successor to Mr Nazarbayev as president.
Mr Nazarbayev gave no reason for Mr Tasmagambetov’s demotion.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
FEB. 1 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two Soviet-era Mi-24 military helicopters crewed by Georgians and Belarusians collided on the border of Rwanda and Uganda, media reported. The Georgian ministry of defence said that the Georgian crew were working privately and were not employees of the Georgian military. It’s unclear how serious the crews’ injuries are. The incident does highlight the use of contractors from Georgia and other parts of the former Soviet Union who were trained to fly Soviet planes and helicopters.
FEB. 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) —
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
ALMATY, FEB. 1 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — After days of rumours, South Korea’s Kookmin Bank confirmed that it would sell its 41.93% stake in Kazakhstan’s CenterCredit Bank to a Kazakh consortium.
The sale will both end an unhappy time in the Kazakh finance sector for Kookmin Bank and also highlight the worsening weaknesses in the Kazakh system.
CenterCredit is Kazakhstan’s fourth largest bank by assets. The consortium buying Kookmin’s share is lead by Tsenabank, which is the third largest bank in Kazakhstan.
“On the basis of preliminary agreements, the Consortium has completed talks with Kookmin on the final conditions for the Consortium to purchase the stake by the now owned by Kookmin Bank,” Tsenabank said in a statement.
It also said that CenterCredit’s chairman, Bakhytbek Baiseitov, would by the 10% stake in the bank now owned by the International Finance Group, part of the World Bank.
Mr Baiseitov is one of the wealthiest men in Kazakhstan. He set up CenterCredit Bank in the late 1980s and made the original deal to sell a 30% stake in it to Kookmin Bank in 2008 for $500m. Kookmin Bankhave had to write down the value of their stake in CenterCredit Bank constantly and it has become to be viewed as one of their worst ever deals. Shortly after buying their first stake in the bank, the Global Financial Crisis hit the Kazakh finance sector, swamping it with bad debt, forcing the government to bail out a handful of banks.
And Kazakhstan’s banking sector has been hit again by a collapse in the value of the tenge, low oil prices and a recession in Russia. The proportion of non-performing loans has risen.
Last year, the ratings agency Fitch said CenterCredit Bank’s ratings were constrained by “high problem loans, low core capital ratios, and modest core profitability.” It said the proportion of bad loans in its portfolio was around 16%. This was one of the highest, with Tsenabank having a bad debt ratio of around 5%.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
