MARCH 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Coca Cola Hellenic Bottling, the Armenian distributor of soft drinks, said it disagreed with the State Commission for Protection of Economic Competition which imposed a 50m dram ($102,000) fine on it for unfair competition last week. Coca Cola Hellenic said it will challenge the fine in court.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 8 2016, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgian PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili said he wanted to write into the national constitution that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, a thinly disguised attempt to woo conservative voters ahead of a parliamentary election in October.
Georgian society is broadly conservative and anti-gay rallies have been strongly supported over the last few years. Gay rights rallies have been attacked.
Mr Kvirikashvili’s Georgian Dream coalition is facing a tough battle to win another term in office.
It has tried to canvass votes from Georgia’s conservative base by looking for support from the influential Georgian Orthodox Church. The Church is anti-gay rights.
“We have a pending initiative that would guarantee the protection of the sacred institution of marriage, via the constitution,” media quoted Mr Kvirikashvili as saying.
This would mean changing the constitution to ensure that marriage is only possible between a man and a woman.
He appeared to be responding to an initiative by Georgian civil rights lawyer Giorgi Tatishvili who has been lobbying for same-sex marriage.
Importantly for Georgia, the EU has highlighted its conservative views over gas rights and other civil issues as a potential stumbling block for its integration into the EU.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Can it really be acceptable for Georgia’s PM to ask for the constitution be altered to block gay marriages? He wants, in effect, to subvert the country’s constitution to match his own beliefs.
This is wrong. It is not up to the PM or the government to tinker with a national constitution when it feels like it.
And it feels even more sullied because this is an election year. The suspicion is that Georgian PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili sees this as a vote winning ploy, a tool to woo Georgia’s important conservative base.
The Georgian Dream coalition, Mr Kvirikashvili’s party, has a reputation for going after the conservative vote and this very much feels as if it is playing up to this reputation. Georgia’s Constitutional Court should stand up to him and tell him to get on with the job of governing the country rather than trying to turn the national constitution into a political football.
For observers, Mr Kvirikashvili’s comments about the constitution should put them on warning about just how vicious this up and coming election campaign is likely to be.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tarkhan Batirashvili, a Georgian citizen who has become one of the most senior ISIS commanders, has either been killed or seriously injured in a US air strike. The US military said that their air-strike had killed Batirashvili, described as IS’s minister of war, although IS later reported that he had been injured. Georgians from its Pankisi Gorge region which borders Chechnya to the north have been joining IS.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
TBILISI, MARCH 6 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — UK-based Noricum Gold will install a second drilling rig at its Kvemo Bolnisi mine in Georgia, it said, to bring forward the start of production to the third quarter of 2016.
Noricum said in a statement it was stepping up its operations in Georgia, after it announced new discoveries last month.
“Having recently raised £1 million which is sufficient to see us through to production in Q3 2016, we intend to firstly produce gold ore from Kvemo Bolnisi where drilling is currently underway, and then at Tsitel Sopeli,” Greg Kuenzel, Noricum’s general director, said in a statement.
Mr Kuenzel also said the company had raised £1m ($1.4m) to bring in the extra equipment and speed up production.
Noricum owns a 50% stake in the Bolnisi gold and copper project, an 860 square km complex of mines in southern Georgia.
It bought the stake for £2.6m ($3.7m) from GMC Investment in July 2015. The remaining 50% belongs to Georgia’s Caucasian Mining Group, owned by Russian entrepreneur Dmitri Troitsky.
Reserves at the Bolnisi project include 980,000 tonnes of copper, 6.6m ounces of gold and 22m ounces of silver.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijani and Turkish air forces launched joint exercises, media reported, highlighting the close relations between the two countries. Azerbaijan and Turkey regularly hold military exercises together. Azerbaijan is still officially at war with Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey has fallen out with Russia over the shooting down of a Russian fighter-jet last year.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The European Parliament issued a rare strongly worded statement criticising a recent crackdown on media in Kazakhstan. “MEPs are deeply concerned about the climate for the media and free speech in Kazakhstan, where strong pressure on independent media outlets includes some being closed down, and news agency directors and journalists being detained, placed under criminal investigation and sentenced to prison,” it said.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 9 2016, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — Non-performing loans, a major signifier of the banking sector’s economic health, have started to rise again in most large Kazakh banks, data showed.
Other than Kazkommertsbank, which wrote-off swathes of non-performing loans last year after it merged with debt-ridden BTA Bank, only Halyk Bank of the big lenders improved its loan portfolio in 2015.
Halyk Bank is owned by business- man Timur Kulibayev and his wife Dinara Nazarbayeva, daughter of Kazakh Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev. Tsensabank, Bank Centre Credit and the Kazakh subsidiary of Russia’s Sberbank all saw the ratio of non- performing loans in their portfolios worsen.
Kazakhstan is sensitive to the proportion of non-performing loans held by its banks because after the 2008/9 Financial Crisis it was considered to have one of the worst ratios of bad to good loans in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – General Raheel Sharif, Pakistan’s military chief, made his first trip to Tajikistan, pledging his full support for defeating terrorism in the region. This is important as it shows the growing bonds between Central and South Asia. Tajikistan is part of the CASA-1000 plan to generate electricity in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan which is then exported to Pakistan, via Afghanistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
MARCH 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan will raise its target annual oil production in 2016 by 5% to 77m tonnes if oil prices remain at around $40/barrel, media quoted energy minister Vladimir Shkolnik as saying. This is important because a rise in both production and price would give government revenues in Kazakhstan a much-needed lift.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 271, published on March 11 2016)
