SEPT. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Armenia detained 50 people during a protest against electricity price rises for businesses. The government backed down after a series of protests in July and said it would subsidise a 17% price rise for residential property but that businesses would have to pay it.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 17 2015, YEREVAN (The Conway Bulletin) — The owner of the Armenian Electric networks company, Russia’s Inter RAO Holding, said it wanted to sell the company to Cyprus-registered Liormand Holdings Limited, triggering more bad feeling towards the company which many people already blame for trying to raise electricity prices.
It’s unclear why RAO would want to sell the Armenian electricity provider to a Cyprus shell company, but Russia does have a background in using this type of scheme to muddy companies’ ownership structures.
Whatever the reasons, the depth of bad feeling towards RAO and confusion about what the deal means for ordinary people was clear on the streets of Yerevan after the announcement.
Anna Khachatryan, a student, said: “We don’t know anything about Liormand Holdings Limited. Is it a good manager?”
Earlier this year thousands of people protested in Yerevan against a proposed 17% price rise, eventually forcing the government to back down and drop most of the plans.
The 1in.am news website wrote in a commentary, that the deal to sell the company was problematic.
‘The sale of the electricity networks does not give the answers of existing important economic and political questions, but, in fact, raises many new questions,” it wrote.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Almaty and the oil-rich region of Mangistau in the west of the country are the only regions in Kazakhstan receiving a significant inflow of people looking for work, data published on the ranking.kz website reported. The data also showed that most of the people moving to these areas settled in villages rather than cities.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Europe’s main election monitoring watchdog, the OSCE’s ODHIR, said it won’t send observers to Azerbaijan’s parliamentary election on Nov. 1 because the Azerbaijani authorities had imposed too many restrictions to make it worthwhile.
The decision by the OSCE not to monitor Azerbaijan’s elections for the first time since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 is a major snub to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and pushes relations between Europe and Azerbaijan to a new low.
At a press conference later in the week with Czech President Milos Zeman who was visiting Baku, Mr Aliyev said: “As you probably know already, cooperation between the European Parliament and the Azerbaijani Parliament has been suspended. This is the result of the dirty campaign being waged against us.”
On Sept. 11, Azerbaijan cancelled an EU delegation visit to Baku and also started the process of pulling out of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, a group that pulls together the European Union and parliaments from the former Soviet Union.
The European Union and Azerbaijan have rowed over Mr Aliyev’s commitment to human rights and free speech. Azerbaijani officials have over the past couple of years detained and imprisoned several prominent human rights campaigners and journalists. Western governments have criticised Azerbaijan for the crackdown while Azerbaijan has said it is the victim of a smear campaign.
But the OSCE’s decision not to monitor Azerbaijan’s election is a watershed decision that pushes the one-time strong Western ally closer towards Russia.
The OSCE, which has never judged an election in Azerbaijan to be either free or fair, said that the conditions that the Azerbaijani authorities had set were just too restrictive to operate effectively.
It had wanted to place 30 long- term and 350 short-term monitors in Azerbaijan for the election but had instead only been allowed six long- term monitors and 125 short-term monitors.
“The restriction on the number of observers taking part would make it impossible for the mission to carry out effective and credible election observation,” the OSCE said in a press release.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Uzbek government said it would increase all utility prices from Oct 1, a decision prompted by the regional economic malaise.
The state water supply company said drinking water rates would increase by 8% and hot water by 5% in Tashkent; electricity prices will increase by 8%; gas prices by 7.3%.
The announcements will pile extra pressure onto ordinary people who are already dealing with price inflation for food and petrol as well as a drop in their own spending power because of a major fall in remittances.
Data from the Russian Central Bank showed that cash sent back by Uzbek workers had halved in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2014.
Inflation has been creeping up across Uzbekistan. Earlier this month, the government said that it was going to increase public sector salaries by 10%.
Unofficial reports from Uzbekistan have said that this injection of cash into the economy has also inflated food prices by 30%.
Higher tariffs will pose especially serious challenges to the Uzbek population given the approaching winter coupled with plummeting money remittances from abroad, the increasing staples and services prices as well as anticipated shortages of fuel, gas and electricity.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — On inflation, the data looks worse in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, compared to other economies which have managed to keep prices flat. In the period between Jan.-Aug. 2015, prices in Armenia grew by 4.8%, in Tajikistan by 3.2%, in Azerbaijan by 3.8%, according to their statistics committees.
Despite the steady growth in consumer prices, the region’s economies are containing inflation. For a comparison, inflation in Russia reached 15% in August.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Geoplant, the largest tea-producing company in Georgia, opened a $2m plant in Tbilisi’s western district of Ozurgeti. The government scheme ‘Produce in Georgia’ provided the funding for the construction of the tea sorting and packing plant. The company said the sorting plant will help it increase export capacity. Geoplant owns the Gurieli brand of tea. It was established in 1996 and set up the Gurieli Export brand in 2010 to boost sales.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s Central Bank intervened in the money markets to stop the tenge from dropping below 270/$1. Kairat Kelimbetov, the Central Bank chief, had told the FT earlier in the week that the Bank would not intervene again after it ditched a peg to the US dollar last month. The tenge is now trading around 266/$1.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — On Sept. 17, for the first time the Central Bank of Kazakhstan published data on the activities of Kazakh banks in the currency market. This decision greatly pleased liberal economists and advocates of transparency in Kazakhstan’s banking sector. But it didn’t please everybody. In one table, the Central Bank listed the amount of US dollars that banks
purchased and sold the day before. If a bank buys a large quantity of US dollars, it suggests that it may be engaging in speculation activities, or at least this is what the public could read into the data. By unveiling turnaround data only, the Central Bank irked Halyk Bank, who ranked first for volume traded.
The next day, in a rare complaint, Halyk Bank said the figures were “incomplete and misleading”.
Despite having traded $58m (around 12% of the whole banking sector), Halyk said it had been a net seller by $34m.
This is a much more patriotic figure.
And the bank, owned by powerful businessman Timur Kulibayev and his wife Dinara Nazarbayeva, now wants the Central Bank to publish the detailed numbers since Aug. 17, the day before the first adjustment to the tenge/dollar exchange rate, which led to the decision to let the tenge off its dollar peg, effectively spurring a new devaluation.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Czech president Milos Zeman flew to Baku for an official visit where he met with Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and visit parliament, only a few days after Europe-Azerbaijan relations dropped to a new low over an election monitoring row.
Mr Zeman, considered something of a maverick, praised Mr Aliyev and Azerbaijan, saying that Azerbaijan should reconsider its decision earlier this month to start the process of suspending its membership of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, a group that brings together the European parliament and parliaments from former Soviet countries.
Relations between the EU and Azerbaijan have dropped to a new low this year over European criticism of Azerbaijani human rights. Azerbaijani officials have responded by accusing the EU of trying to plot a coup.
Mr Zeman signed a number of business deals with Mr Aliyev on his trip.
Most importantly, coming only a few days after Europe’s vote monitoring watchdog, the OSCE, declined to observe Azerbaijan’s elections, it broke ranks.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
