Tag Archives: Azerbaijan

Six killed in gun-battle in village near Azerbaijan’s capital

NOV. 26 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Two Azerbaijani policemen and four gang members were killed during a gun-battle in a village near Baku when the authorities raided what they described as the stronghold of a group with links to religious extremists.

The fierce battle, which involved machine gun fire and grenades, shocked people living in Baku, triggered warnings from the authorities of a rise in violence linked to extremists and threatened to damage Azerbaijan’s relations with neighbouring Iran.

Although they didn’t explicitly link violence to IS in Syria, the authorities have been increasingly nervous of IS recruitment in Azerbaijan.

In a statement Azerbaijan’s prosecutor-general said that the group, called the Muslim Unity Movement was planning various attacks across Baku and that they had links to Islamic extremists.

“These people and their supporters gathered in Baku and other regions, stocked with various types of weapons, ammunition, explosives,” the prosecutor-general said.

“During the operation, the gang showed armed resistance to police officers and started firing automatic weapons, hand grenades were also thrown.”

The prosecutor-general also said that 14 so called gang members were arrested during the raid in the village of Nardaran.

But neighbouring Iran viewed the incident differently.

The men who were killed were Shia Muslims. Azerbaijan is officially a secular country and the authorities have previously cracked-down on the Shia community, much to the irrita- tion of Iran. The Iranian official media was scathing of the Azerbaijani authorities’explanation.

The Iranian-state owned PressTV described the violence as a crackdown on Azerbaijan’s Shia Muslims.

“The attack came as Shias gathered for a religious ceremony in the village of Nardaran to mark Arabaeen, December 2, the 40th day since the death of Imam Hussein and his followers in a battle of Karbala,” it said. “The reports said violence erupted when security forces attempted to arrest Tale’ Bagirzade, the leader of the MMU, who was delivering a speech on the occasion.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 258, published on Nov. 27 2015)

Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s presidents to meet on Karabakh

NOV. 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan will meet in Paris on Dec. 1 to discuss their cease-fire over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, media reported.

The two countries are still officially at war over Nagorno-Karabakh and meetings between the two leaders are rare. Their last meeting was also in Paris in 2014.

Armenian-backed rebels control Nagorno-Karabakh but there are constant skirmishes that kill soldiers almost every week. Over the past few years tension over the region has ebbed and flowed, sometimes threatening to spill over into all-out war.

Earlier this month, the Azerbaijani ministry of defence said that its forces had killed two ethnic Armenian fighters. The Armenian government confirmed this and said that two of its soldiers had been killed by an Azerbaijanji sniper.

At previous meetings between Mr Aliyev and Mr Sargsyan, these normally take place in Paris or Moscow, there have been warm words and friendly photo-ops but no lasting moves to bring about a permanent peace to the region.

Only a 1994 UN-brokered cease- fire maintains a shaky peace. The war killed an estimated 30,000 people and created thousands of refugees.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 258, published on Nov. 27 2015)

Azerbaijan’s Sofaz to diversify portfolio

NOV. 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Without giving specific detail, Israfil Mammadov, the deputy executive director of Azerbaijan’s sovereign wealth fund Sofaz told Bloomberg News that the fund would be diversifying its investment portfolio next year. Sofaz has already diversified into real estate, gold and equities. Earlier this year, Sofaz bought a landmark shop on one of Tokyo’s most well-known retail streets.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 258, published on Nov. 27 2015)

Azerbaijani AAM begins copper production

NOV. 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — London-listed Azerbaijani miner Anglo Asian Mining said it produced and shipped the first batch of copper concentrate from its Gedabek mine in the west of the country. Through the new copper flotation plant, inaugurated in October, the company aims to return to profitability, Reza Vaziri, the Anglo Asian’s CEO said in a statement. The market had a lukewarm reaction, and its share price in London remained at 5.13p.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 258, published on Nov. 27 2015)

Azerbaijani energy company releases gas figures

NOV. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company SOCAR said it produced 5.76b cubic metres of gas in the first 10 months of the year, down 5.5% compared to last year. Oil and gas exports are vital to the Azerbaijani economy.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 258, published on Nov. 27 2015)

Azerbaijan’s Azerfon expands coverage

NOV. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Nar Mobile brand of Azerbaijan’s telecoms company Azerfon said it has expanded 3G and 4G coverage in the country. Kent McNeley, Azerfon’s CEO, said the company has doubled its total network capacity in the past two years. Nar Mobile was awarded a licence to operate LTE networks earlier in February.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 258, published on Nov. 27 2015)

TeliaSonera’s appoints Tajik Tcell’s head as Eurasia VP

NOV. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Swedish mobile provider TeliaSonera appointed the former head ofTcell, Tajikistan’s biggest mobile network provider, Mansur Khamidov to be a vice-president in charge of the Eurasia region. TeliaSonera is currently restructuring its operations and has said that it wants to sell its Eurasia companies, partly because of corruption allegations alleged against its Uzbek subsidiary. As well as Tajikistan, TeliaSonera owns mobile operations in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Azerbaijan’s oil/gas output drops

NOV. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Despite pledging to maintain oil and gas production this year, both have fallen in Azerbaijan. Oil production, vital for the economy, fell 2% to 35m tonnes in the first 10 months of the year, a government source told Reuters, and the national statistics office said gas production dropped 2.7% in same period.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Explosion shuts down Azerbaijan’s internet

NOV. 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A fire at an internet data centre in Azerbaijan knocked nearly the entire country off the World Wide Web for several hours, highlighting the fragility of the country’s infrastructure.

The internet tracking website renesys.com said that the fire at Data Telecom, the near-monopoly internet provider, knocked out 78% of Azerbaijan’s internet system. It also took out Azercell, one of three main mobile providers, as it relies heavily on Data Telecom for transmission.

Acting minister of communications and high technologies ltimas Mammadov – the communications minister was fired last week – told the Azernews website that the fire caused the outage at 4.15pm (1215 GMT).

“Internet outage occurred due to equipment damage at the technical centre of Azerbaijan’s primary service provider,” he said. “However, transmission channels to Georgia, Iran, and the Middle East were working at full capacity.”

Banks said that electronic payments and the SWIFT money transfer system also failed.

The outage will be an embarrassment to Azerbaijan which has tried to project an image of being a thoroughly modern country. Its communications systems now appears over-reliant on one service provider.

In 2011, a 75-year-old woman in Georgia accidentally sliced through a cable, cutting Armenia off from the internet. Georgia had provided 90% of Armenia’s internet access.

The internet black-out in Azerbaijan has shown that the South Caucasus’ internet is still fragile.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Currencies: Kazakhstan’s tenge, Kyrgyzstan’s som

NOV. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh tenge was steady this week, trading at around 307.2/$1, off an all-time low against the US dollar of 311/$1 earlier in November.

There is still much speculation by analysts on just how monetary policy in Central Asia’s biggest economy is going to change under new Central Bank chief Daniyar Akishev. He said that inflation was too high and appeared to make this his priority.

With this in mind, expect another interest rate rise at the Central Bank’s policy meeting next month — if the policy wonks don’t cancel it again. There are, though, two urgent problems, it seems to me, with the Kazakh monetary policy. People don’t know what it is or whether it works.

The new key interest rate — overnight repo rates — was only introduced in September. It was raised in October to 16% from 12% and then ignored in November when the Central Bank cancelled its policy meeting at the last moment. Does this interest rate have any credibility? Does the market even care about it? It doesn’t appear to have had any effect so far.

And Mr Akishev appeared to acknowledge as much when he said that a fall in oil price would send the tenge tumbling further. Oil prices, outside the Kazakh Central Bank’s control, are the driver of tenge value and not its key interest rate.

In neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, the som currency did continue to set new records against the US dollar. It hit an all-time low on Friday of 72.5/$1 versus 71.9/$1 at the start of the week. On Oct 1, the som had been valued at 68.8/$1, meaning that it has lost over 5% of its value in the past seven weeks.

As the Bulletin reports in the main section of the newspaper, information coming out of Turkmenistan is that its manat currency has devalued and that the government has placed restrictions on the amount of cash people can withdraw from the banks. Earlier this month, The Bulletin also reported on the devaluation of the Uzbek soum.

Even staunchly controlled currencies are feeling the pressure, it seems.

And over in the South Caucasus, it is a similar story. Since its sharp 33% devaluation in February, the Azeri manat has been kept steady but analysts have increased chat of a need to devalue again.

Both the Armenian dram and the Georgian lari were steady through the week.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)