FEB. 14 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s Central Bank cut its key interest rate yet again to 6% from 6.25%, hoping to give its economy a boost. Armenia has now slashed its interest rate from 10.5% in 2015. The Central Bank’s biggest worry is deflation. Annualised deflation in January measured 0.6%, the Central Bank said.
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(News report from Issue No. 317, published on Feb.17 2017)
FEB. 13 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia sent a second batch of humanitarian aid, mainly canned food, to Syria, the RFE/RL website reported. The aid was sent through the Russian military base in Syria. The food bore inscriptions in Arabic and Armenian which said: “With warm wishes for peace from Armenia to the brotherly people of Syria!” Tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians, mainly living in Aleppo, have fled the civil war.
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(News report from Issue No. 317, published on Feb.17 2017)
FEB. 15 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Armenia’s first post-Soviet president between 1991 and 1998, confirmed that he will head a party list for the Armenian National Congress (ANC)-People’s Party of Armenia alliance at parliamentary elections in April. Mr Ter-Petrosyan, 71, cuts a controversial figure. He still commands support from loyalists and considers current president Serzh Sargsyan to be his great opponent. In 2008, he was blamed with whipping up anti- government sentiment amongst a crowd that ended with clashes with police and the death of at least 15 protesters.
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(News report from Issue No. 317, published on Feb.17 2017)f
FEB. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — WorldRemit, a money wire service, said that it had extended its services to Armenia and Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine and Belarus, through a partnership with the Russian payment system Contact. Previously, London-based WorldRemit has concentrated its services in southeast Asia and Africa. It said that WorldRemit will operate 330 service points in Kazakhstan and 65 in Armenia. Remittances are a vital plank of the economies of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia wants to buy between two and four Sukhoi Superjet-100s from Russia over the next couple of years, media reported quoting Russian industry minister Denis Manturov. The Sukhoi Superjet-100 is a Russian-made and designed passenger aircraft. It was released in 2008. Sukhoi, which is state-owned, has struggled to sell the aircraft, though, except to Russia’s allies. The Sukhoi Superjet-100’s first commercial flight was between Yerevan and Moscow in 2011.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Price inflation in Armenia is increasingly diverging between food and non-food items, the presidential adviser to the National Statistics Agency, Gurgen Martirosyan, said. In January, he said, food prices were 7.4% higher than in December 2016. Non-food prices, though, fell 3.4% and services by fell 1.8%.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 9 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Armenia-registered subsidiary of Canada’s Lydian mining has taken out a loan of $50m with ING Bank to fund buying equipment at its gold mine in southern Armenia. Lydian said that the cash would be used to buy crushing, conveying and electrical equipment for its 100%-owned Amulsar Gold Project. It expects gold production to begin in 2018.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The McDonald’s fast food chain has no intention of opening a restaurant in Armenia, its Europe spokesperson Sanjay Mistry said, dampening media speculation that Georgian businessman Temur Chkonia was planning to extend his McDonald’s franchise to Yerevan. In 2016 McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
YEREVAN, FEB. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A group of Western finance organisations lead by The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) agreed to lend ContourGlobal Hydro Cascade, a subsidiary of the US group by the same name, $140m to upgrade the Armenian Vorotan hydropower plant.
Upgrading the 404MW Vorotan hydropower plant is considered vital to boosting Armenia’s green power output. It was built by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and has only been patched up in a piecemeal fashion since.
Importantly, too, the upgrade scheme will created hundreds of jobs in the mountainous Syunik province of southeast Armenia, the rural and underdeveloped region where the plant is sited.
“This is the first time we are putting together very large, long-term financing package for an infrastructure project in Armenia,” the IFC said.
The deal was struck on Dec. 29. It involved a $45m loan from the IFC, $65m from FMO, the Dutch development bank, and $30m from DEG, the German Investment and Development Corporation.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — At a congress in Yerevan, Gagik Tsarukyan one of the wealthiest Armenians, was officially sworn in as chairman of the Prosperous Armenia party. He had quit the party in 2015 after a row with Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan but said last month that he wanted to return for Armenia’s parliamentary elections in April. Analysts said that his return was designed to pull anti-government votes away from the real Armenian opposition parties.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
