Tag Archives: business

Tea factory opens in Georgian capital

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.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)

Business comment: Halyk Bank & The Money Markets

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)

Czech Airlines fly to Armenia

SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Czech Airlines said it will fly between Prague and Yerevan from Dec. 13 to Jan. 16. Jan Toth, the company’s director of marketing said the airline wanted to cover the busy Christmas and New Year period.

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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)

Lithuanian railway to open in Kazakhstan

SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Lithuanian Railways will open a representative office in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, the company said in a statement. “Kazakhstan is Lithuania’s major railway partner in Central Asia. Stasys Dailydka, a director at Lithuanian Railways, said trade volumes, mainly minerals, had been increasing rapidly over the past six years.

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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)

Kazakh state company director resigns

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)

Korea invests in Uzbek Lukoil

SEPT. 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian energy company Lukoil said it is negotiating with Korea Eximbank, South Korea’s state export credit agency, on funding for its projects in Uzbekistan. Lukoil is building a $2.66b gas processing plant in Kandym, 100km south-west of Bukhara, with South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering and is developing several projects along the Turkmen-Uzbek border.

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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)

Kazakhstan justifies soft drinks tax

SEPT. 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government said a new tax on the extraction of groundwater is justified despite complaints from soft drinks producers, as companies have previously underpaid for water. “It is important to note that we have a serious shortage of drinking water in Kazakhstan,” Shafkhat Kudabayev, of the State Revenue Committee, told vlast.kz. The soft drink industry lobby groups have said the new tax will put companies out of business.

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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)

Georgia approves Tbilisi electricity price rise

SEPT. 3 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Following earlier electricity price rises in Georgia’s regions, the state regulators approved a similar price increase in the capital.

For the Georgian Dream, the ruling coalition, the price rise means they have barely been able to fulfil one of their promises from the 2012 parliamentary election – to cut the price of electricity and to keep it low.

But, as Akaki Tsomaia, economics professor at the University of Georgia explained, the plunging value of the lari had forced the regulators to agree to the price rise.

“Georgia is experiencing a 45% depreciation of its currency against the US dollar. Electricity and gas providers in Georgia have no other way than to increase the price of these services. Otherwise we will definitely have a major electricity shortage,” he told the Bulletin.

Still, this assessment, which is widely shared, didn’t stop the opposition UNM party blaming the coalition.

“The absence of professionalism led us to this point,” UNM’s deputy chairperson Nika Melia told TV broadcaster Rustavi-2.

Electricity prices have triggered protests in the region, most notably in Armenia where thousands protested earlier this year and forced the government to waive price rises.

In Georgia which is known for its street level politics, however, the population seems to have accepted the rise more quietly although some people did expect protests shortly.

Vladimir, an IT specialist walking along Tbilisi’s central promenade said: “People will probably start next month once they get bills.”

Irakli, 37, who was waiting at a bus stop, agreed but he said that politics, was the key driver of social unrest.

“We’ve taken to the streets so much in the recent two decades, but for other reasons,” he said. “But it all accumulates and only needs one non- social spark to explode.”

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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)

Azerbaijan’s SOCAR confirms Malta interest

SEPT. 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – SOCAR confirmed that it wants to play a role in building a gas-fired power plant in Malta, media reported.

It’s unclear just why SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas company, would want to build a power plant in Malta but it has an office on the island which it has said it uses to reduce its global tax bill.

SOCAR chairman Abdullayev Rovnag met with Maltese PM Joseph Muscat before a football match between Malta and Azerbaijan to discuss the two countries’ cooperation, local media reported.

There was no more detail from the meeting on the power station.

The Times of Malta, though, reported on SOCAR’s Maltese operations earlier this year. It said that SOCAR had set up a company in Malta in 2007 that acted as the parent company of Geneva-based SOCAR Trading. SOCAR Trading generates billions of dollars each year by trading oil. It saves itself a large chunk of tax, the Times of Malta reported, by booking the profit on these sales in Malta. Malta markets itself as a low tax, offshore base for companies trading in Europe.

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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)

Astom produces Azerbaijan’s trains

SEPT. 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — French railway company Alstom has started producing 50 freight locomotive trains for Azerbaijan, media reported. The contract, signed in 2014, is worth around 300m euros. Alstom’s new AZ8A electric locomotives will be built specifically for Azerbaijan.

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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)