JULY 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s construction company Gilan Holding picked Switzerland- based Liebherr as the provider of cranes for a skyscraper complex to be built in Baku. Gilan’s project for The Crescent Bay, will include a hotel, a shopping mall and a residential unit and is one of the biggest real estate projects currently planned in Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)
JULY 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s power generation company Hydro Corporation said it will invest 8.9b drams ($4.2) to rebuild its small hydropower station on the Argichi river in the east of the country. The hydropower station was built in 2013 and financed through a loan from Germany’s development bank KfW.
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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)
JULY 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Japanese-Turkish consortium said it completed construction at a petrochemical plant in Turkmenistan’s north-eastern Lebap province. Japan’s Mitsui Engineering Shipbuilding, Sojitz Corporation and Turkey’s Renaissance Holding completed the plant, which will have an annual production capacity of 500,000 tonnes of sulphuric acid, used for fertilisers, detergents and synthetic fibres. Most of the plant’s production is earmarked for exports.
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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
JULY 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — >>Right. Let’s get started. The Rogun Dam. What is it and what is it all about?
>>For Tajikistan and President Rakhmon, the Rogun dam project is vitally important. If it is ever built, and the plans have been knocking around since the Soviet era, the Rogun dam will be the tallest dam in the world at up to 335 m. It will also double Tajikistan’s power generation capacity. The problem is that the dam has proved highly controversial, domestically and internationally, and is also expensive to build.
>>Hang on. Slow down. This is a lot take on. So, Rogun is massive but why is it controversial?
>>It’s controversial because human rights group have accused the government of forcibly moving thousands of people away from the Vakhsh River valley, the area that will be dammed and flooded. The government has also imposed a Rogun dam tax on people to pay for the project. This has gone down badly with human rights groups. Externally, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan’s neighbour, hates the idea of the Rogun dam. It worries that the dam will divert water from irrigating its cotton fields.
>>How serious are Uzbekistan’s concerns?
>>Central Asia is a fragile region. If Uzbekistan is making threatening noises
towards Tajikistan, people need to take notice. Analysts and diplomats have spoken of water wars in Central Asia. I’m not saying that the Rogun dam is going to trigger a war but it is another pressure point that people need to watch.
>>Got it. So with all these obstacles and problems why is Tajikistan pushing for problems?
>>It’s become Rakhmon’s pet project. He probably has another five or ten years left in office and it really feels like he wants and needs the Rogun dam to be his legacy. It’s also become vitally important for Tajikistan’s electricity generation sector. Electricity is becoming an important export commodity for Tajikistan as it has signed up to be the main power generator for the so-called CASA-1000 project.
>>CASA-1000? What is that?
>>It’s the World Bank-backed project to build a power transmission network from Tajikistan to Pakistan. It will cost around $1.2b, cross Afghanistan and be operational, if it all goes to plan, by 2019. The challenge is both security and power generation.CurrentlyTajikistan, and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan, doesn’t have the capacity to generate enough power to meet its CASA- 1000 commitments. That’s where Rogun comes in.
>>And the financing? This seems to be an expensive project just when the region is trying to deal with a financial crisis. Where is the finance coming from?
>>Good question. We’re not entirely clear. We’ve only been told that it is a mix of government funds and private investment. Who the private investors are and what their motives are is unknown.
>>I see. So what next?
>>Well, the Tajik government awarded a $3.9b contract to Italian builder Salini Impregilo to start construction work on the dam. We’re still waiting for work to begin but Salini Impregilo has said it will kick off soon. This has been a stop-start project so actually seeing the diggers go in and the workers start to build the dam is important. If this does happen, it’ll dominate news headlines for years to come.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
DUSHANBE, JULY 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The revival of the Rogun hydropower project, for which Tajikistan awarded a $3.9b tender last week, surprised both analysts and people living in Dushanbe.
Most had assumed that the project first dreamt up under the Soviet Union had been mothballed. There had been no major break- through on the project for the past few years and the middle of an economic downturn is no time to start a major infrastructure project.
Still, it appears Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon had other ideas. Now, Italy’s Salini Impregilo, the construction company that won the tender, says it will complete the dam, set to be the world’s tallest, and the first two power stations by 2018.
Manu, a 28-year-old student in Dushanbe, summed up many Dushanbe-residents’ thoughts when he said that he had believed that the dam would never be built.
“I thought we would not build Rogun any time soon,” he told the Bulletin’s Tajikistan correspondent. “It all happened unexpectedly but I am excited.”
If Rogun is successfully completed it will double Tajikistan’s power production and turn it into a major regional electricity exporter.
Analysts, though, were sceptical about the aggressive timeline that Salini Impregilo has set.
Filippo Menga, researcher at the University of Manchester who has studied Tajikistan’s hydropower, told the Bulletin that large dams are never built on time.
“There is still uncertainty on who is going to fund the Rogun dam, delays are clearly foreseeable. The timeline is simply not realistic,” he said.
The Rogun dam project is cer- tainly ambitious and will change Tajikistan’s fortunes if it is success- fully completed. It will also leave a lasting legacy for the 63-year-old Mr Rakhmon who, if reports are to be believed, is already thinking about his succession strategies.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
DUSHANBE, JULY 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan handed a $3.9bn contract to Italy’s Salini Impregilo to build the Rogun dam and hydroelectric power plant, a controversial project that sits at the heart of the country’s future energy production.
Salini Impregilo, Italy’s biggest construction company, said it had already received funding of $1.95b for the construction of a dam on the Vakhsh river, which will become the tallest in the world at 355m. A company spokesman said that work would start soon.
“The idea is to have two of the six turbines start producing energy for sale by 2018 in order to raise funding to complete the project,” the company said in a press release.
The Rogun dam project is controversial because it is opposed by down- stream Uzbekistan which worries that the complex will divert water away from its cotton fields. Environmentalists have also complained about the damage the dam will cause to the region’s lush valleys and human rights activists have exposed the forced eviction of thousands of people from the area.
Still, for Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon, the Rogun dam has become one of his pet projects. In 2011, he received a major boost when the World Bank endorsed it in two feasibility projects.
Around 70% of Tajikistan’s energy production comes from hydroelectric power stations. Once Rogun comes online, Tajikistan could become a hub for the region. It already plans to export electricity to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Salini Impregilo has built 250 dams worldwide and in August 2015 it won a $575m contract to build the Nenskra hydropower plant in Georgia.
The company said it will build six power stations atRogun, with a total capacity of 3,600MW, roughly equivalent to Tajikistan’s current capacity.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
DUSHANBE, JULY 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan awarded a $3.9b contract to Italian construction company Salini Impregilo to build the controversial Rogun dam in the Pamir mountains.
The Soviet-era plan has been on hold for several years because of worries over its funding and opposition from Uzbekistan that it will siphon off water needed to irrigate its cotton fields.
The timing of the $3.9b deal for Salini Impregilo was unexpected and appears to suggest that the Rogun dam project is up and running once again.
Tajikistan needs the dam to boost electricity production. It suffers countless blackouts in winter, when there is less water generating hydropower, and has also committed itself to supplying both Pakistan and Afghanistan with power from 2018.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
JUNE 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The World Bank approved a $978m loan to finance the construction of a road link across Kazakhstan, which will complete the transit corridor between Astana and the west of the country. The project will cost a total of $1b and will be partly funded by the government. The World Bank is also funding part of the Kazakh section of the Western Europe – Western China highway.
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(News report from Issue No. 285, published on June 17 2016)
JUNE 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government said it will have to recalculate costs for the construction of a petrochemical technopark in a Special Economic Zone near Atyrau, due to the depreciation of the local currency. Nurlan Rakhmetov, managing director at Samruk-Kazyna, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, said costs will rise. As of June 1, the local consortium building the technopark has received 40.7b tenge ($120m) from the state budget.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
JUNE 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican party candidate for a presidential election later this year, has quietly ditched a real estate project in Azerbaijan that had been linked to an father-son combination allegedly connected to the Iranian military, the AP news agency reported.
Mr Trump had made the initial deal in Baku in 2013 with Anar Mammadov. His father Ziya Mammadov is a government minister and is also alleged to be linked to various money laundering schemes as well as to the Iranian military. Although some sanctions were lifted on Iran earlier in the year, it is still an offence to do business with the Iranian Republican Guard.
Mr Trump has not commented on the case although his staff have said that the project had been delayed because of economic conditions.
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(News report from Issue No. 284, published on June 10 2016)
