AUG. 23 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan should produce 1.1m tonnes of processed cotton in 2013, the same level as last year, an industry website reported quoting government officials. Cotton is a major foreign currency earner for Uzbekistan, the world’s sixth largest producer and second largest exporter.
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(News report from Issue No. 149, published on Aug. 26 2013)
AUG. 22 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s four-party governing coalition collapsed, triggering potential long-term political instability. The Ata-Meken and Ar-Namys parties, always tricky partners in the coalition, withdrew their support over corruption allegations against PM Omurbek Babanov and a stalling economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 102, published on Aug. 24 2012)
AUG. 9 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Hackers attacked the Kyrgyz foreign ministry website, temporarily plastering it with Turkish language slogans, media reported. It was not clear who was behind the attack, the website of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. The attack did, though, show the vulnerability of Kyrgyzstan’s government.
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(News report from Issue No. 147, published on Aug. 12 2013)
AUG. 9 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — In an interview with the FT, Umirzak Shukeyev, chairman of Kazakhstan’s $80b sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna, said he wanted to streamline the organisation and improve corporate governance standards. Over the past few years, Kazakh companies have attracted increased criticism on governance issues.
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(News report from Issue No. 147, published on Aug. 12 2013)
AUG. 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi acquitted Bacho Akhalaia, Georgia’s former interior minister and an ally of President Mikheil Saakashvili, of abusing his office. Mr Akhalaia still faces two other charges, including instigating a prison mutiny, in one of the most politically sensitive trials in Georgia in recent years.
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(News report from Issue No. 146, published on Aug. 5 2013)
JULY 26 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Tajik Central Bank has stopped publishing monthly remittance data because it can be manipulated for political gain, media quoted its head, Abdujabbor Shirinov, as saying. Remittances account for roughly 50% of the Tajik economy, the highest proportion in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 145, published on July 29 2013)
JULY 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh deputy interior minister, Yerlik Kenenbayev, was badly injured in a car crash in north Kazakhstan. The crash killed Mr Kenenbayev’s wife and son. It, again, highlighted Kazakhstan’s poor road safety record. Mr Kenenbayev and his family had been travelling back to Astana.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — It’s not over yet but Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has suffered a sharp fall in authority over the past nine months.
Lauded as the leader of the 2003 Rose Revolution that swept away the remains of the old Soviet power structures in Georgia, he has ceded authority across the country since his political party, United National Movement (UNM) lost a parliamentary election in October 2012.
The victors of the parliamentary election, Georgia’s richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his opposition coalition, have gradually taken increased control of local councils as UNM deputies switched sides.
Police have also detained dozens of UNM deputies and business leaders on corruption charges.
Now, Mr Ivanishvili’s supporters have wrenched Tbilisi City Hall from the UNM. On July 20, Georgian media reported that members of the city council had voted out the Tbilisi city council leader after his support gradually drained away in the preceding weeks.
Coming before a presidential election scheduled for Oct. 27, the loss of Tbilisi City Hall will be another blow to Mr Saakashvili’s authority. For foreign business in Georgia, the next few months will be increasingly turbulent.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh authorities’ hunt for opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov has taken a distinctly geo-political twist.
On July 12, a court in Italy ruled that the Italian authorities had illegally detained and extradited to Kazakhstan Alma Shalabayeva, wife of Ablyazov, and their daughter. They had been living for several months in a villa outside Rome when armed, masked men detained them in a night raid at the end of May. Two days later they were on a plane back to Kazakhstan. Most standard procedures, the government has now said, were ignored.
Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, is suspected of ordering the extradition, although he has denied this.
Mr Alfano, the interior minister, is a close ally of Italy’s former PM Silvio Berlusconi who is often described as a friend of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Ablyazov is wanted in Kazakhstan for allegedly embezzling billions of dollars from BTA Bank, where he had been chairman before fleeing in 2009, and financing opposition forces. He is also on the run from British police for perjury.
Regardless of the row that has erupted in Italy, Ablyazov is still on the run. Until he is captured the Kazakh authorities will both pull in more favours across the globe and continue to pressure opponents at home.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Kazakhstan have vowed to improve the reputation and effectiveness of the police. They have introduced fitness and aptitude tests and prosecuted various senior police officers for bribe taking.
According to a new survey by the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International (TI), though, they have a long way to go.
In TI’s annual Global Corruption Barometer, more than half of the Kazakh interviewees said they had a paid a bribe to the police in the past year.
Of course there were other services that also rated poorly for bribe taking, including so-called land services, medical services, the judiciary and education. In each case over a quarter of the respondents said they had paid a bribe but illegal payments to the police were noticeably worse.
Perhaps more worrying for the Kazakh authorities was the answer to the question on whether interviewees felt corruption had gotten worse or better over the past year. Nearly 35% answered that corruption in Kazakhstan had worsened in the past 12 months compared with 21% who said it had improved.
For their global corruption barometer, TI surveyed 1,000 people in each of 107 countries between September 2012 and March this year. The results are by no means definitive but, for Kazakhstan at least, they do make for an interesting, and important, snapshot.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
