Tag Archives: international relations

Azerbaijan to finance new refinery in Turkey

MAY 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company, said it would borrow $4b to part-finance an ambitious new oil refinery in Turkey, only 10 days after figures showed slowing output at its most important oil field.

The refinery, to be built in western Turkey, will be operational by 2016 and produce 10m tonnes of oil a year. The $4b loan will cover around two-thirds of the construction costs.

SOCAR will fund the rest of the project itself.

Azerbaijan’s wealth is anchored to its energy industry and the refinery plan projects both a confidence about the future and an understanding of its most important market — Europe.

The importance of Europe as Azerbaijan’s main market was underlined when the European Commission approved plans to build a pipeline to pump gas from Azerbaijan across the Adriatic to Italy, on May 17.

A few days earlier, though, on May 7, BP announced that production at the main oil field in the Azeri sector of the Caspian Sea, Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG), was still falling. Bloomberg reported that production at ACG, which produces three-quarters of the country’s oil, had dropped to 662,000 barrels per day in Q1, a fall of 8.4% from a year earlier.

ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 135, published on May 20 2013)

Railway to link Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan

MAY 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his Kazakh counterpart, Nursultan Nazarbayev, opened a rail link that bypasses the Soviet network in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is often regarded as an awkward neighbour because of its unilateral tendencies. The rail link is designed to link up with Iran.

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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved

(News report from Issue No. 135, published on May 20 2013)

UniCredit sells ATF Bank in Kazakhstan

MAY 2 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The deal has been rolling around in and out of public view for most of the year but it now looks as if it’s finally been wrapped up.

KazNitrogenGaz, an investment group officially owned by Galimzhan Yesenov, has bought ATF Bank, one of Kazakhstan’s biggest banks, for $500m from UniCredit, an Italian bank, media reported.

This is a lower figure than previously touted around.

It’s also telling because it’s about a quarter of the price that UniCredit paid for it in 2007.

When UniCredit bought ATF Bank, Kazakhstan’s economy was on the up and banks were, relatively casually, handing out loans to Kazakh consumers and businesses. When the global economy slowed and faltered in 2008, these loans went bad and Kazakh banks, including ATF Bank, took a large hit.

According to reports, 40 percent of ATF Bank’s loan portfolio is still regarded as non-performing.

With the Kazakh economy rebounding in the past five years, the government is preparing to sell off majority stakes in four banks it was forced to rescue from bankruptcy in 2009.

The buyers of the state’s stakes in these banks are wealthy Kazakhs and buying back ATF Bank from UniCredit could be an extension of that plan. The 31-year-old Mr Yesenov is relatively obscure but behind him is his powerful father-in-law, Akhmetzhan Yesimov. That is where the real power and drive for buying ATF Bank may lie.

ENDS
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