Tag Archives: government

Kazakhstan expects delay in state asset IPO

AUG. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will wait until 2018 to start selling off state assets in what has been billed for years as the People’s IPO, Baljeet Kaur Grewal, managing director for portfolio investment at Samruk-Kazyna, the Kazakh sovereign wealth fund told Bloomberg in an interview. He said the fund wanted to wait for oil prices to pick up before selling various assets.

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(News report from Issue No. 293, published on Aug. 29 2016)

Uzbek president nears death after stroke

AUG. 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbek President Islam Karimov suffered a stroke on Saturday which left him with a brain haemorrhage, his daughter Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva said, setting up a succession battle over Central Asia’s most populous country.

Uzbekistan is, effectively, a lynchpin for stability in Central Asia. Its population of 31.5m is nearly as much as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan combined, it borders every other country in the region and had been the Soviet Union’s Central Asian administrative and logistical centre.

Under Mr Karimov’s rule, Tashkent lost out to Almaty as the commercial centre of Central Asia for Western multi-nationals but it still holds great sway at a more local level.

Mr Karimov has never publicly named a successor. His eldest daughter Gulnara Karimova, who had looked destined to succeed him fell from grace in 2014 over bribery allegations, leaving Uzbekistan set for a potentially messy succession battle.

Ms Karimova-Tillyaeva said her 78-year-old father had been hospitalised on Saturday after the stroke.

“At the moment it is too early to make any predictions about his future status,” she wrote on Instagram.

Uzbekistan is famed for its central role along the Silk Road, the fabled trade route several centuries ago that connected Europe and China.

Recently, though, Uzbekistan has earned a reputation for repression and for having a closed economy. Western companies have complained of state interference; accusations of slave labour have undermined Uzbekistan’s important cotton sector.

But the US, Russia and China — the major influences on Central Asia — will be hoping for a peaceful handover of power. The radical IS group has been growing in influence and the worry is that it may try to take advantage of any power vacuum.

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(News report from Issue No. 293, published on Aug. 29 2016)

Armenia’s president sacks security chiefs

AUG. 3 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan sacked Hrant Yepiskoposyan, first deputy director of the National Security Service, after partly blaming him for a two week stand-off with gunmen linked to an imprisoned opposition leader who had captured a police station in Yerevan.

The standoff ended after the gunmen gave themselves up but not before it had triggered street battles between supporters of Zhirayr Sefilyan, the imprisoned leader of the radical opposition group Founding Parliament and a hero veteran of the war in the 1990s with Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Dozens of people were arrested during the clashes, the worst in Yerevan for more than eight years.

Three policemen were also killed during the standoff which ended on July 31. Police have said that they were shot dead by the gunmen who captured the police station.

The authorities refused to release Mr Sefilyan, a key demand of the gunmen, but the standoff did trigger a serious constitutional crisis for Mr Sargsyan and has damaged his standing.

Analysts said that the capture of the police station and the support that the hostage-takers appeared to garner from ordinary people showed the level of frustration at Mr Sargsyan and his supporters.

“Many of them were almost certainly taking an opportunity to protest against the status quo, rather than endorsing an act of violence,” analyst Thomas de Waal wrote on the Open Democracy website.

“But even that is an indication of how desperate many mainstream Armenians feel in the face of a political system which they feel has no place for them — and which, due to recent constitutional changes, is likely to see Sargsyan and his team retain their grip on power for many years.”

Since the stand-off ended, Mr Sargsyan has sacked senior security officials. Kevork Kostanyan also resigned as the country’s prosecutor-general.

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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)

Kyrgyzstan’s minister of culture resigns

JULY 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s minister of culture Altynbek Maksutov resigned, saying that he wanted to return to creative work. Mr Maksutov, a former actor and director of the Kyrgyz National Philharmonic was appointed minister of culture in October 2014. Earlier in July, PM Sooronbai Jeenbekov reprimanded Mr Maksutov for his so-called, and unexplained, inappropriate behaviour.

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(News report from Issue No. 291, published on Aug. 1 2016)

Turkmen President reprimands several officials

JULY 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — During a visit to the Mary province, Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov reprimanded several government officials and sacked several others for delays to various construction projects, opposition websites reported. Earlier in July, during a visit to the Lebap province, Mr Berdymukhamedov sacked 11 public officials. As Mr Berdymukhamedov fights to contain the fallout from a worsening economic outlook, his rampages against and sackings of government officials intensifies.

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(News report from Issue No. 291, published on Aug. 1 2016)

Kazakh foreign ministry fires drunk diplomat

JULY 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry commented on the firing of an embassy worker in London, who was caught drunk driving last year. The ministry clarified that the unnamed person was not a diplomat, but a technician, who was removed from his post and sent back to Kazakhstan.

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(News report from Issue No. 291, published on Aug. 1 2016)

Electricity prices increase in Azerbaijan

JULY 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s government said that it is considering an increase in electricity prices for households of 16.7%, local media reported. The price will increase from 0.06 manat to 0.07 manat/kWh. This is the first price increase since 2007. Domestic electricity prices in the South Caucasus are sensitive. People in Armenia and Georgia have demonstrated against tariff increases over the past few years.

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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Turkmenistan reorganises its oil and gas ministry

JULY 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a move that took observers by surprise, Turkmenistan abolished its oil and gas ministry which had, officially, run the most profitable economic sector in the country, part of a wider structural reform of the government.

At a cabinet meeting, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov justified the move as an effort to improve management and governance systems n the energy sector.

Turkmenistan is considered an important stakeholder in the world’s energy nexus, and the move shook analysts. It holds the fourth-largest gas reserves in the world and exports gas mostly to China via pipeline. For over a decade, European and US lobby groups have pushed for a Trans-Caspian Pipeline to pump Turkmen gas to Europe. Turkmenistan is also building TAPI, a gas pipeline to export gas to India, via Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Simon Pirani, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said that aside from internal causes, which are hard to guess, a range of external factors could have played in Turkmenistan’s decision to reorganise its hydrocarbon sector.

“The continuing relationship with China, despite lower off-take of gas than Turkmen officials had hoped, the improved ties with Iran and the quite bad relationship with Russia could all be relevant factors,” he told The Conway Bulletin.

The change, however, is unlikely to shift the way that Turkmenistan does business, a system that revolves around the whims and decisions of President Berdymukhamedov.

“Companies and international organisations are aware that Turkmenistan is a centralised system,” Mr Pirani said.

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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Kyrgyz Election Commission unseats MP

JULY 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s Central Election Commission unseated MP Jyrgalbek Samatov after proving he had used fake documents to lodge his candidacy for a parliamentary election in October last year. The government’s election watchdog found that Mr Samatov had not relinquished his double Russian-Kyrgyz citizenship ahead of the election, which made him automatically unelectable. Mr Samatov later said he would sue the Commission.

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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)

Two ministers quit in Georgia

JULY 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two key Georgian ministers linked to the Republican party resigned as the campaign battle for the upcoming parliamentary election intensified. Defense minister Tina Khidasheli, one of the two outgoing ministers, had sparked controversy in June when she unilaterally decided to scrap conscription in the army. Paata Zakareishvili, the other outgoing minister, worked in the State Ministry for Reconciliation, which liaises with the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)