JAN. 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Revenues earned by the Kazakh national railway company were down by 12.6% in the 11 months to the end of November compared to the same period in 2014, the ranking.kz website reported. The website said that passenger numbers had dropped off, another sign of the tight grip that the current economic downturn has taken of Kazakhstan.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)
JAN. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – At least 11 people have died of H1N1 Swine Flu in Armenia, media reported quoting the ministry of health. The ministry of health said that this did not equate to an epidemic, although there are another 80 people in prison suffering from the flu. Swine flu worries governments around the world because it can spread and has previously triggered epidemics.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)
JAN. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Iran’s parliament ratified a security deal with Tajikistan despite a row over an invitation to a Tajik opposition leader to visit Tehran that dented relations between the two countries earlier this month. Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani had agreed the security deal in 2014.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)
FEB. 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan’s parliament said a referendum on both ditching limits on presidential terms and reducing the minimum age for presidential candidates would be held on May 22, a move widely perceived as allowing Emomali Rakhmon and his family to retain their hold on power.
The 63-year-old Mr Rakhmon has ruled over Tajikistan since a civil war in the mid-1990s. He is generally considered an autocrat who has enriched his family and their supporters and crushed opposition.
Last year the Tajik authorities banned the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, previously the country’s only official opposition party.
Mr Rakhmon appears to be hedging his bets ahead of a presidential election in 2020.
The constitutional changes, which are likely to be voted through by Tajiks more concerned with the economy than political reforms, will mean that he can either stand for a fourth term as president or that his eldest son, Rustam, can run for president. Rustam will be 33 in 2020. The constitutional amendments will reduce the minimum age for presidential candidates to 30 from 35.
People voting in the referendum will also be asked to decide whether to outlaw political parties linked to religion, a move appeared designed to block any splinter group from the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) gaining any popular backing.
Separately, a court in Dushanbe started the trial of 13 members of the IRPT who are accused of radicalism.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 267, published on Feb. 12 2016)
DEC. 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev said a recession in Russia had hit the Kremlin’s finances so hard that it had pulled out of financing two hydropower projects in Kyrgyzstan. Russia’s economic demise presents an opportunity for China or others to fund infrastructure projects in Central Asia in return for influence. The two projects had been expected to cost $3.2b.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
DEC. 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh government has scrapped plans to build a new nuclear power station, despite years of speculation over its location, size and financing, media reported quoting energy minister Vladimir Shkolnik. Mr Shkolnik said the country was producing enough power from other sources, although the government’s shrinking budget probably played a role in the decision.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
DEC. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — TALCO, the Tajik state-owned aluminium company, received the rights to develop a cluster of gold and precious metals deposits in the area near Ayni, north-west Tajikistan. The Tajik government granted TALCO the rights to the deposits of Konchoch and Skalnoye for 25 years. TALCO will also build a processing facility in the area.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
DEC. 21 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s Central Bank cut the manat from its US dollar peg just before Christmas, immediately triggering a 50% fall in its value.
This was, in effect, the second currency devaluation by Azerbaijan in 2015. The manat started 2016 trading at 1.56 /$1, 50% lower than it had been a year earlier.
Speaking a couple of days after the un-pegging of the manat, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev said officials had had no choice but to effectively devalue the manat.
“The main reason for the change in the manat’s rate was a decline in oil price by three times. It means that the change was inevitable,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
This is a major climb down from an earlier position held by Mr Aliyev and the Central Bank. At the start of 2015 he told media that a devaluation was definitely not on the cards only to order a 33% cut in the value of the manat in Feb. 2015.
Since then , in the past 10 months, the Azerbaijani Central Bank has spent billions of dollars trying to defend the value of the manat despite analysts warning that a devaluation was needed. When Kazakhstan ditched its own peg to the US dollar in August, triggering a 40% drop in the value of the tenge, this second devaluation of the manat became an inevitability.
Azerbaijan has been particularly exposed to the drop in oil and gas prices — down to 11-year-lows. Oil and gas sales make up around 95% of its export revenue and 75% of total government revenues. To counter the sharp fall in prices, down by around 75% since July 2014, the Azerbaijani government has slashed spending on infrastructure and social projects.
Fitch, the ratings agency, said the devaluation was needed but that it would hurt the banking sector.
“The sharp exchange rate adjustment eases the oil shock’s fiscal impact by boosting the local-currency value of oil revenues and a floating currency should help stabilise reserves,” it said. “The devaluation will hurt the banking sector, which has large amounts of foreign- currency denominated loans.”
The government has imposed currency controls over foreign exchange transactions. It said that people wanting to exchange over $500 worth of manat now needed to present a formal ID.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
DEC. 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – China pays considerably less for the gas it bought from Turkmenistan between Jan. and Nov. 2015, compared to the same period in 2014, Chinese media reporting quoting official stats. China increased supplies from Turkmenistan by 13.8% during this period but still only paid $22.3b, 15% less than the total bill during the same period in 2014. Turkmenistan is largely reliant on China for its revenues although it is developing a gas route to India.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
JAN. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s emergency ministry confirmed that it had recovered two bodies from the Turkmen sector of the Caspian Sea thought to be those of workers washed overboard during a storm and fire on an oil rig in December. 33 workers died in the fire, the worst offshore oil rig platform disaster since the North Sea Piper Alpha fire in 1988.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
