Category Archives: Uncategorised

Kazakhstan’s fund invests in Balkhash

APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Samruk Energo, a subsidiary of Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna, said it paid 11b tenge ($33m) to double its stake in the Balkhash Thermal Power Plant project to 50% minus one share. It did not say who it bought the stake from although last year Korea-based Samsung Engineering said it wanted to quit the project. The new Balkhash power plant will cost around $4.2b to build, according to Samruk Energo’s latest estimates.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Uzbek authorities comment on high speed train

APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Uzbek government said its high-speed train link from Tashkent to Bukhara, one of its headline projects, will be completed in August. The government has said that the rail link will cost around $400m to complete. It has partnered with European businesses such as Spain’s Talgo and France’s Alstom to build it. Once completed, the railway line will halve the travel time from Tashkent to Bukhara to around 3-1/2 hours.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Kazakh businessman closes in on total control of Kazkommertsbank

ALMATY, APRIL 20 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — The finish line is now in sight for Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh businessman linked closely to the country’s elite, who has seemingly made taking over Kazkommertsbank one of his priorities.

In this process, control of Kazakhstan’s largest bank has been ripped from Nurzhan Subkhanberdin, a former opponent of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

A KazKom statement said that Mr Rakishev, 36, will buy out Subkhanberdin’s remaining shares in the bank by the summer. Mr Rakishev is also poised to become the next chairman in May.

“[Mr Rakishev] is expected to chair the board of directors and Marc Holtzman, chairman, shall take the CEO position in May 2016 after the extraordinary general meeting of shareholders,” KazKom said earlier this month.

As of this week, Mr Rakishev owns a 71.23% stake in Kazkommertsbank. When he buys out the rest of Mr Subkhanberdin’s shares, his stake will rise to 86%. Samruk-Kazyna, the Kazakh sovereign wealth fund owns a 10.7% stake in KazKom and the rest is owned by unnamed minority shareholders.

This takeover started in February 2014 when, essentially, the Kazakh government started to offload the debt-ridden BTA Bank onto KazKom and also to use it as a Trojan Horse to dislodge the London-based Mr Subkhanberdin.

Analysts have said the government, with Mr Rakishev as the nominated project leader, forced KazKom to buy BTA Bank from Samruk-Kazyna.

This weakened Mr Subkhanberdin’s control of the bank and started a process that has propelled Mr Rakishev to both being the owner and chairman of KazKom.

The eventual merger of KazKom and BTA Bank last year and the promotion of Mr Rakishev are the biggest changes to Kazakhstan’s banking sector since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/9, but both the government and Mr Rakishev have been assiduous in avoiding commenting in public about it.

Even so, Mr Rakishev has developed an increasingly high public profile in Kazakhstan.

The son-in-law of the current Kazakh minister of defence, Mr Rakishev shot to prominence in 2008 as the go-between for Timur Kulibayev, President Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, and the British Royal Family when he bought an estate in England from Prince Andrew.

Since then, he has had a hand in some of Kazakhstan’s biggest business deals.

He also, officially, owns a 75% share in industrial holding Sat&Co. and a 20% stake in Central Asia Metals, a copper producer listed in London.

To this list he can now add KazKom.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Industrial production falls in Kyrgyzstan

APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s industrial production fell by 25.7% to 39.5b som, mainly due to a slump in the mining sector, the Statistics Committee said in a report. The figures reflect the 4.9% GDP decline the Committee posted last week. Without accounting for Kumtor, Kyrgyzstan’s largest gold project, industrial output would have declined by 1%.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Stock market: BGEO Group

APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Shares in BGEO Group, the London-listed holding company that owns Bank of Georgia, gained 6% this week, rallying on the company’s positive annual results.

It posted a 38.4% growth in revenue and its retail banking customer base grew by 37.8% in 2015.

Neil Janin, BGEO’s chairman, also gave a strong outlook.

“The current economic and political situation in Georgia is solid and its outlook promising,” Mr Janin said in a statement, praising the recent tax code amendments.

Georgia holds parliamentary elections in October which may impact BGEO. The company was cagey about this and said that it hoped the country would “continue in the right direction”. In Georgian politics, though, anything can happen, as we’ve learned through the years.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Azerbaijan’s GDP shrinks in Q1

APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s GDP shrank by 3.5% in the first quarter of the year to 12b manat ($7.95b), the Statistics Committee said. A fall in industrial production and flat oil production have worsened Azerbaijan’s overall economic performance, according to the government.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Town ditches Kazakh President

APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Harich, a small village in north western Armenia, renamed a street previously dedicated to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in retaliation for his perceived support for Azerbaijan over Armenia in the neighbours’ row over Nagorno-Karabakh. Earlier this month the most serious fighting in two decades broke out between Armenia-backed fighters and Azerbaijan around Nagorno-Karabakh.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

UN urges Kyrgyzstan to release activist

APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The UN Human Rights Council urged Kyrgyzstan authorities to release Azimzhan Askarov, a political activist arrested in 2010. In July 2015, the US government described Mr Askarov as a political prisoner and awarded him a special human rights award. This sparked an angry reaction from the Kyrgyz government and damaged Kyrgyzstan-US relations.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

CNPC says Kazakh Kashagan restart delayed until 2017

ALMATY, APRIL 21 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — CNPC, China’s state owned energy company, said the Kashagan oil project will re-start production in June 2017, six months later than the Kazakh government has said it expects a restart.

At a press conference in Moscow, Wang Zhongcai, a vice-president at CNPC, said a launch, by the middle of 2017, was “likely,” Reuters news agency reported.

Just last week, Sauat Mynbayev, head of Kazakhstan’s state-owned Kazmunaigas, said the government forecast production by October and earlier this year, Exxon, which holds a 16.81% stake in the project, had also said it saw commercial production resuming by the end of 2016.

In September 2013, weeks after starting production, the consortium running Kashagan, one of the largest and most complex oil development projects in recent times, was forced to halt operations due to damaged pipelines.

In mid 2013, CNPC bought an 8.33% stake in Kashagan from Kazmunaigas. The share previously belonged to ConocoPhillips.

The other Kashagan shareholders also include Kazmunaigas, Total, Eni, Shell and Japan’s Inpex.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)

Uzbek authorities release Karimov critic

APRIL 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek authorities released from prison Shukhrat Nusratov, a former MP who criticised President Islam Karimov in the first few years of Uzbekistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr Nusratov had been jailed for seven years in 2012 for various economic crimes that his supporters said were fabricated.

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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)