SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Almaty and the oil-rich region of Mangistau in the west of the country are the only regions in Kazakhstan receiving a significant inflow of people looking for work, data published on the ranking.kz website reported. The data also showed that most of the people moving to these areas settled in villages rather than cities.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
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)
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)
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)
SEPT. 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Irish industrial services company Deborah Services Limited (DSL) and Lancaster Group, a Kazakh private holding company, signed a multi-million euro agreement to form a joint venture to serve oil and gas operations in Kazakhstan. Infrastructure and utility support firm Siteserv owns DSL. The new company, DSL Caspian, will provide protective coatings and fire protection at onshore and offshore oilfields in Kazakhstan. Lancaster Group is closely linked to the Kazakh elite. Yerbolat Dossayev, currently minister of economic development, is a major stakeholder in the group.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
SEPT. 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Iran’s Khazar Exploration and Pro- duction Co. (KEPCO), a subsidiary of National Iranian Oil Company, met with officials from the Azerbaijani state oil and gas company SOCAR in Tehran to discuss how best to work together to explore and exploit oil fields in the Caspian Sea. Iran has has begun to re-integrate into the global community.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
SEPT. 11 2015, YEREVAN (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian gas monopoly Gazprom agreed to cut the price of gas it sells to Armenia by 12%, giving the Armenian government much needed economic breathing space.
The economic turmoil blowing through the former Soviet region has hit Armenia hard. Its dram currency has lost around 20% of its value and its economy is stalling.
Inflation is also rising and protesters have become increasingly agitated about utility price increases. Earlier this year, thousands of people demonstrated against proposed electricity price rises, eventually forcing the government into a climb-down.
Now Gazprom, which owns 100% of Armenia’s gas network, appears to have taken pity on Armenia.
Shushan Sardaryan, a spokeswoman for Gazprom Armenia, said that the new price was set at $165, down from $189, for 1,000 cubic metres of gas.
“The current price of natural gas was based on an exchange rate of $1 equalling 416 Armenian drams,” she told reporters. “But the exchange rate significantly differs from this level and the fluctuations damaged the company.”
The dram is now hovering at around 480 against the US dollar.
Ms Sardaryan also made the point that although Russia had reduced the cost of its gas to Armenia, this price reduction would not be passed on to consumers.
Instead, the saving would be made by the government. Armenia has also floated the idea of pricing its gas in roubles, rather than US dollars, a move which would, in theory, protect it from price rises linked to the devaluation of its dram currency.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
SEPT. 11 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The biggest movers on the stock markets were copper producer KAZ Minerals which finished the week up 8%, Roxi Petroleum settled down 12% and Centerra Gold fell by 6.6%.
KAZ Minerals’ share price has fluctuated wildly, hit by China’s economic health and commodity prices. It is now trading at 162 pence, up from around 150 pence at the start of the week. It is sensitive to the value of the tenge which weakened by 10% this week and gave KAZ Minerals a lift.
Roxi Petroleum’s main oil assets are in Kazakhstan.
Its shares fell after it said it was having to downgrade the value of its assets by 28% in line with the fall in the tenge last month.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
SEPT. 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – If oil prices continue to fall, Kazakhstan may cut production back to 73m tonnes a year, media quoted deputy energy minister Uzakbai Karabalin as saying. Kazakhstan is projected to produce around 80m tonnes of oil this year. Oil is the main driver of the Kazakh economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
SEPT. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — London-listed Roxi Petroleum said it had downgraded the value of its assets in Kazakhstan by 28% after last month’s devaluation of the tenge. Roxi’s main activities are focused in the Mangistau region, west Kazakhstan. Since the announcement, Roxi’s share price has fallen by 12%.
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(News report from Issue No. 247, published on Sept. 11 2015)
