JAN. 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s President Giorgi Margvelashvili has started searching for a successor to Giorgi Kadagidze who will complete his 7-year term as head of the Central Bank in February. Mr Margvelashvili’s nominee will have to be voted in by the Parliament before he or she can assume office.
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(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)
DEC. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree to create two new security agencies, the State Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service, and disband the National Security Ministry. Earlier this year, Mr Aliyev sacked Eldar Mahmudov as national security minister. The next day police arrested several ministry officials.
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(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)
DEC. 11 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – KazTransGas, Kazakhstan’s gas distributor, named Rustam Suleymanov as its new CEO. Mr Suleymanov has worked at KazTransGas for 15 years. Former CEO Kairat Sharipbayev was named chairman of the board.
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(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)
NOV. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev fired his long-serving communications minister Ali Abbasov, the second sacking of a government minister in two months.
Mr Aliyev has generally preferred to keep people in key positions for years, so the sackings have created an unusual sense of instability around the Azerbaijani government.
Mr Abbasov had been communications minister for over 11 years.
The presidential press service announced the sacking through an online statement. No reason was given for the sacking although shortly afterwards police arrested 10 senior officials in the communications ministry and charged them with corruption.
The pattern is similar to the sacking last month of national security minister Eldar Mahmudov. He had also been in the job since 2004. Similarly, after Mr Mahmudov was sacked, police arrested several senior officials in the national security ministry for corruption.
Azerbaijan is routinely criticised for its corruption levels but it is unusual for the state to purge its own ranks for alleged graft and even more unusual for an internal investigation to trigger ministerial sackings.
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(News report from Issue No. 256, published on Nov. 13 2015)
NOV. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev sacked Kairat Kelimbetov as head of the Central Bank, two years after he was handed the job.
He promoted 39-year-old Daniyar Akishev, a former deputy head of the Central Bank and his personal economic adviser, to take over from Mr Kelimbetov.
Under Mr Kelimbetov’s watch a combination of low oil prices and a recession in Russia has battered Kazakhstan’s economy. The tenge currency has lost around half its value since Feb. 2014.
Mr Nazarbayev said that he had lost confidence in Mr Kelimbetov. “The lack of confidence in the economy and the national currency — the tenge — should not be allowed to continue,” he said in a statement on his website. “It’s important to work to fix this poor performance.”
The Kazakh Central Bank has lost credibility over the past couple of years. It has flip-flopped on monetary policy and has spent billions of US dollars propping up its currency before defaulting first in Feb. 2014 and then in August this year.
On each occasion, events have appeared to wrong-foot Mr Kelimbetov.
In 2014, he admitted at a press conference after the devaluation that he hadn’t expected it to happen. In August he said that the tenge had moved to a free float against the US dollar before presiding over several more interventions to prop up its strength.
But news that he had been sacked failed to halt the slide in the value of the tenge. By Friday, Nov. 6, it had touched an all-time low against the US dollar of 310/$1.
Inflation data for October presented Mr Nazarbayev and his advisers with more bad news. Pushed up by the devaluation in August, inflation for the year to end-October measured over 9%.
And the disorganisation surrounding the Central Bank also appeared to continue. Shortly after it released a statement saying it would no longer spend millions of US dollars propping up the tenge, the Central Bank cancelled its monthly interest rate meeting without giving a reason or setting a new date.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Daniyar Akishev’s promotion to head the Kazakh Central Bank may have taken observers by surprise but to those who know the 39-year-old, it is a job he has been groomed for.
Mr Akishev is a veteran of the Central Bank, where he worked in various positions from 1996 to 2014 before moving to the Akorda as economic adviser to President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
In 2007 Mr Akishev was rumoured to be in pole-position for taking on the role of new chief of the financial regulator.
Instead has was named deputy head of the Central Bank, a position he held for seven years, under three different bosses.
In particular, Central Bank insiders said he achieved professional maturity under Grigori Marchenko, a respected liberal economist, who often clashed with Mr Nazarbayev on economic policies.
There have been wobbles, though, in Mr Akishev’s rise to the top. In December 2008, ominously, he said the economic situation was ideal for Kazakhstan.
“The Central Bank has no problems with the exchange rate of the tenge, quite the contrary,” he told RIA Novosti in an interview.
Two months later, the Bank devalued the tenge by 19%.
Media quoted some local analysts as saying that Mr Akishev lacks independence because of his young age and his lack of political authority. But Mr Akishev is the same age as Mr Marchenko was when he was named head of the Central Bank for the first time in 1999 and is five years older than Oraz Dzhandosov was, when he became Central Bank chief in 1996.
Mr Akishev’s predecessor, Kairat Kelimbetov, who held the job for two years during which the tenge lost half its value, had a different profile and no background at the Central Bank.
Mr Akishev might have accepted possibly the toughest job in Kazakhstan, but he is also one of the few people in the country with the experience and background to take it on.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
OCT. 18/20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev sacked National Security Minister Eldar Mahmudov two days before police arrested seven other senior officials and accused them of abuse of office.
The move surprised analysts of Azerbaijan’s murky political scene as Mr Mahmudov had been considered a close ally of Mr Aliyev.
He had held the position as the powerful National Security Minister for 11 years and no reason was given for his dismissal. Mr Aliyev had handed him the position of National Security Minister within a year of taking over as president from his father.
Although Mr Mahmudov has not been arrested, the Azerbaijani Prosecutor-General opened criminal cases into his seven officials for abuse of office.
“Investigative operations have raised suspicions about a group of ministry officials abusing service powers, illegally intervening in the activities of entrepreneurs in violation of the law on entrepreneurship, and violating the judicially and legally protected interests of different individuals,” it said in a statement.
Human rights groups and opposition activists have previously accused Mr Aliyev of undermining his opponents by accusing them of corruption.
The arrests and the sacking of Mr Mahmudov, whether they are linked to corruption or not, add a degree of instability to Azerbaijan, already rocked by the imprisonment of journalists and opposition activists.
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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
SEPT. 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Abat Nurseitov resigned as general director of KMG EP, the London-listed unit of Kazakhstan’s state oil and gas company. Mr Nurseitov had been general director since January 2013. Dastan Abdulgafarov, the CFO, was appointed interim CEO.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
SEPT. 1 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgian PM Irakli Garibashvili sacked his foreign minister in a cabinet reshuffle that once again promoted people close to his own political mentor, Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Giorgi Kvirikashvili was shifted to the foreign ministry from the economy ministry and Tbilisi’s deputy mayor Dimitri Kumsishvili took over the economy ministry brief. Both men had previously worked at Cartu Bank, Mr Ivanishavili’s private bank. Mr Garibashvili, the PM, also worked at Cartu Bank.
Opponents of PM Garibashvili said that he was just doing his master’s bidding by replacing Tamar Beruchashvili, who had disagreed with him publicly on some policies, as the foreign minister but he said the changes were linked to a shift in policy direction.
“The government focuses on economic development and employment. This should also determine our foreign policy,” he said .
Korneli Kakachia, a professor of political science at Tbilisi State University and director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, told The Bulletin that Mr Ivanishvili single-handedly decides what happens in government.
“Mr Ivanishvili only trusts insiders with whom he has worked. That is why Cartubank employees have a privileged position,” he said.
This is a widely held view. Earlier this year, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said they were concerned that Mr Ivanishvili wanted to promote people who worked at Cartu Bank to prominent government positions.
“A pattern can be detected of individuals who were formerly employed by companies associated with Bidzina Ivanishvili being appointed to senior positions in the public service,” it said in April.
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(News report from Issue No. 246, published on Sept. 4 2015)
ALMATY/Kazakhstan, AUG. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Reports from Uzbekistan said that Marinika Babanazarova, the curator and de facto defender of the world famous Savitsky Collection in Nukus, Uzbekistan, has been sacked.
Ms Babanazarova has held the job for over 30 years. She took over from Igor Savitsky himself and considered it her duty to keep the collection together despite pressure to split it up.
She confirmed to the New York Times that she had been sacked. Earlier reports said that the Uzbek authorities had fired her for stealing pictures and making forgeries, accusations she denied.
Relations between Ms Babanazarova and the Uzbek authorities have generally been strained. In 2011, they blocked her from travelling to New York to see the premiere of a film about the collection.
Savitsky was a Soviet archaeologist and painter who collected, often at great personal risk, banned avant-garde art. He travelled across the Soviet Union to collect the art, from dissident artists or from their relatives, and bring it back to his base in the remote city of Nukus in western Uzbekistan. There he was able to avoid the attention of the authorities.
The collection of roughly 90,000 pieces only achieved international fame after his death and the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It has also put Nukus, a scruffy town once classed as a secret because of its chemical weapons production, on the international art trail.
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(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
