APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The EBRD paid €3.3m ($3.8) to become a shareholder in Globaltruck Kazakhstan, a truck operating group. Globaltruck is registered in Cyprus and owns Longrun Asia a start-up trucking company in Kazakhstan. Longrun Asia will use Globaltruck’s equity funds of €10m ($11.4m) to buy up to 300 trucks and trailers.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov flew to Russia to hold high- level talks with his counterpart Vladimir Putin focused on security along Central Asia’s southern border with Afghanistan.
Just weeks after Russia ratified an agreement to pardon most of Uzbekistan’s debt, Mr Karimov’s visit looked like a show of support for Mr Putin.
“There are certain attempts to find a solution to the Afghan issue without Russia. I believe this is wrong,” Mr Karimov told the press after meeting Mr Putin.
On trade, Mr Karimov said a row between Russia and Turkey over the shooting down of a fighter jet over Syria last year may allow Uzbekistan to boost trade with Russia.
“Turkey today can not provide [fruits and vegetables] because of well known reasons. Now tell me, does Uzbekistan produce less fruit and vegetables?” Mr Karimov said, hinting that Uzbekistan might be the perfect substitute for Turkish goods.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – London-based energy service company Amec Foster Wheeler signed a contract for so-called frontend engineering design at Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev Oil Refinery in Bak. SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company, awarded the contract. Amec will complete the work by in Q1 2017.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 29 2016, NUKUS/Uzbekistan (The Conway Bulletin) — The Savitsky Museum in Nukus, west Uzbekistan, will open a new wing in September which will increase its exhibition space by five times, a museum official told a Bulletin correspondent.
The opening of the new wing will be welcomed by art lovers who want to see more of one of the largest collections of Russian avant-garde art.
In an interview, a curator at the Savitsky Museum said: “We will open the new wing on Sept. 1, Independence Day. It will mean we get to show 15% of the art collection, rather than just 3%.”
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan’s government said that an agreement signed in 2011 with Turkmenistan, Iran and Oman to establish what it described as a Central Asia-Persian Gulf Trade Corridor had finally become operational. The deal was agreed to boost trade between the regions. Some analysts, though, have derided the deal as window-dressing.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s parliament elected Chynybai Tursunbekov from President Almazbek Atambayev’s Social Democrat party as their new Speaker, ending a week-long deadlock. Mr Tursunbekov received 88 of 120 votes. A previous vote, a week earlier, had failed to elect a Speaker.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Officials in Azerbaijan appear to have reversed a softening of a crackdown on human rights activists and the media.
Meydan TV, an opposition news agency, said that prosecutors had opened new criminal investigation on alleged illegal business activities involving 15 of its journalists, who have been told they cannot leave the country.
The action disappointed civil rights groups who had, only last week, been applauding the Azerbaijani leadership for allowing Leyla and Arif Yunus to leave Baku for the Netherlands. The two human rights activists had been released from prison at the end of last year. They were imprisoned on various charges, including espionage, which their supporters said had been fabricated.
Nina Ognianova, Europe and Central Asia coordinator at the lobby group the Committee to Protect Journalist, said: “We call on officials in Azerbaijan to immediately cease the witch hunt of contributors to the online broadcaster Meydan TV.”
The day after Meydan TV said that prosecutors had opened new cases against 15 journalists, Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court upheld a six year sentence against Murad Adilov, a member of the opposition Popular Front Party arrested in May last year on charges of drug possession.
Relations between the West and Azerbaijan have been strained over the past three years while Azerbaijani officials have increasingly clamped down on the opposition.
It’s become something of a diplomatic quagmire.
Europe needs Azerbaijani gas and the US wants a stable Azerbaijan as an ally to undermine Russia’s dominance in the region. Both, though, loathe Azerbaijan’s recent human rights record.
As for Azerbaijan, the authorities appear to want to be able to crack- down on troublesome opposition activists, journalists and civil rights workers but they also need Europe to help it extract its oil and gas and also to act as a major energy client.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A crew member died after a Russian oil tanker caught fire in the southern section of the Caspian Sea, between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Coastal guards from the three littoral countries joined forces to extinguish the fire and rescue the rest of the crew. The tanker was not carrying oil at the time of the accident. Last December, a fire at offshore oil and gas platforms killed more than 30 Azerbaijani workers.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The IMF said it will send a mission to Tajikistan in the next few weeks to work on a programme that could lead to a bailout, the FT reported. The IMF had previously offered help to Tajikistan, provided the government embraces a series of proposed reforms. Tajikistan has been hit hard by a regional economical downturn that has crashed into currencies and knocked out vital remittance flows from Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
APRIL 24-27 2016, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A proposed amendment to land registration laws triggered a series of rare protests across Kazakhstan, a reaction that the authorities have handled, so far, with a relative soft touch.
The first and largest rally was held in the western city of Atyrau, when around 1,000 demonstrators gathered to protest against a law which they say would allow foreigners to buy their land. Smaller protests, with a few dozen protesters, were held over the following days in Aktobe, Semey and Aktau.
The amended law is due to come into force in July.
“We are thousands here today, but if they start seizing and selling our land, we will be millions,” one of the speakers at the Atyrau protest said.
Importantly, most of the people at the protests were speaking Kazakh, rather than Russian. Kazakh is prevalent in poorer, more rural sections of Kazakhstan’s society. It is particularly widely spoken in the west of the country, in and around Atyrau, Aktobe and Aktau.
Some analysts said that the protests may have been part of a wider nationalist movement encouraged by the authorities to give a veneer of political discourse without posing any real threat to the elite. Both local governments and officials in Astana dismissed the claim that the new land code would give out land to foreigners.
At a meeting in Astana, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said: “The issue regarding selling land to foreign citizens is out of question. All talks regarding this issue are groundless. Those who heat up these rumours should be brought to justice.”
As The Bulletin went to press, police in Almaty had detained a handful of other activists who had planned a press conference against the new land code.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)
