Tag Archives: Kazakhstan

Kazakh President appoints new minister of defence, again

OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev sacked his defence minister Serik Akhmetov after only six months in the job and replaced him with the powerful mayor of Astana Imangali Tasmagambetov.

No official explanation was given for the sacking, although analysts were quick to come up with two theories.

The first is that Mr Akhmetov was linked to the former governor of the central Karaganda region, Baurzhan Abdishev, who has been tarnished by a corruption scandal. With Mr Nazarbayev pursuing an anti-corruption agenda, he may have wanted to purge his cabinet of potential problems.

The second theory is that with the Ukraine civil war rumbling on, Mr Nazarbayev wanted to ensure that his military was up to scratch. Mr Tasmagambetov is one of his most loyal lieutenants and appointing him as minister of defence will ensure that his orders are carried through effectively. Mr Tasmagambetov has previously been head of the presidential administration, prime minister and mayor of Almaty.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 206, published on Oct. 29 2014)

House price bubbles in Kazakhstan

OCT. 28 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Houses prices in Kazakhstan rose by nearly 10% last year, media quoted the IMF as saying, one of the biggest rises in the world. The spike was far higher in Almaty. Economists have warned of a bubble in Kazakhstan’s housing market.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 206, published on Oct. 29 2014)

Domestic departure blisses at Kazakh city’s Airport

ALMATY/Kazakhstan, OCT. 29 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — It’s early, 6.30am. Almaty is quiet and wet on a late September morning.

A taxi for the airport, booked the previous night, doesn’t arrive as scheduled at the tidy mid-range hotel near the city’s wooden Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

The concierge calls and then calls again. He gets up to wait outside nervously. Finally he suggests his guests stop a car on the street and negotiate a ride to the airport, 20 minutes away. In the rain, the visitors troop out to a busy intersection and wait.

One car arrives and rejects their offer. Two minutes later, another small car pulls up. A friendly fellow with a square jaw and thick hands negotiates a fare to mutual satisfaction and the visitors hop in. “You’ll make your flight,” he reassures his new passengers. “Don’t worry.”

Despite his confidence, arrival at the airport is rushed and hectic. The visitors bound through, up an escalator, towards the domestic check-in area. Two efficient young women — one Kazakh; one Russian — check passports and issue boarding passes.

Check-in complete. Security to go. The visitors turn around to see two security stations, both well-staffed and as efficient as the check-in counter. The visitors pass through in three minutes. Suddenly they have a half hour to kill.

Almaty Airport’s domestic departures area calls to mind successful small airports like London City and Toronto’s Billy Bishop, airports that do so well because they balance passenger volume, adequate staffing, and methodical organisation carefully.

This is a plus for oil workers and executives hoping to get to Atyrau, in west Kazakhstan, with minimum fuss, as well as everybody else flying domestically from Almaty.

If there’s room for improvement — and there always is — the waiting area café would benefit from an upgrade. Lacklustre pastries and mediocre coffee stand in the way of a good passenger experience.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 206, published on Oct. 29 2014)

Kazakhstan announces budget cuts

OCT. 28 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s finance minister Bakhyt Sultanov announced cuts of $1.5b to the national budget over the next two years, a sign of tough economic times driven by sanctions on Russia and lower oil prices. The main cuts will focus on procurement and debt servicing.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 206, published on Oct. 29 2014)

Kazakhstan aims to diversify energy routes

OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan is considering diversifying its energy transit routes because of Western sanctions imposed on Russia, media reported. One option being considered is the Baku-Supsa oil pipeline that runs from the Azerbaijani capital to Supsa on the Georgian Black Sea coast.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Kazakh budget to be reviewed

OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – With the price of a barrel of oil falling to a four-year low, the Kazakh government has said it will review its national budget. Kazakhstan’s economy is propped up mainly by oil revenues. With oil revenues falling and with sanctions hitting Russia, Kazakhstan’s disposable income has shrunk.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Kazakhstan might not be able to afford 2022 Games

OCT. 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s ministry of sport said that if it was to win the right to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2022 it would expect advertisers and investors to fund around 66% of the costs. Kazakhstan is desperate to host the Winter Olympics but observers have said that it might not be able to afford it.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Driving along the Europe-Asia divide in Kazakhstan

URALSK/Kazakhstan, OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Finding a taxi in Atyrau, a city of around 200,000 people in western Kazakhstan near its Caspian Sea coast, for the 500-kilometre journey to Uralsk is easy.

During the late morning, drivers gather at the car park in front of the city’s bus station. It costs 5,500 tenge per person (around $30).

Atyrau is a dusty boomtown, relatively charmless. Good then that it is quickly left behind. North of it is the steppe, interminable and yellow-brown.

The horizon stretches in every direction and very little gets in its way.

Small villages hide down secondary roads. Entrepreneurs sell melons at a few crossroads. There are roadside burial tombs, some standing alone and others in circular formations.

For more or less the entirety of the drive there is a curved line of trees to the east. Sometimes this line of trees is directly adjacent to the road and other times it hovers far in the distance. These trees hug the banks of the Ural River, which snakes down from the Ural mountain range before emptying into the Caspian Sea.

The river is the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Just over halfway to Uralsk the landscape, though still mainly scrub, begins to liven up a bit. Previously, the only trees to be seen were grouped together in unhealthy-looking planned groves.

Very slowly, these spindly man-made groves yield to more natural looking clusters. Slopes give some shape to the terrain over the final 50km of the journey. And then, 10km, outside Uralsk there is a big hill, the first the flat horizon has been broken, after which the city makes itself known to its new arrivals.

Settled by Cossacks and full of ornate cathedrals and brightly-painted wooden houses, Uralsk is a world away from Astana’s contemporary triumphalism.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Kazakh tenge to drop in value

OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – With the rouble under increased pressure it has become likely, analysts have said, that the Kazakh government will devalue its currency for the second time this year.

Halyk Bank placed the tenge on a negative watch. The report, no longer available on the website of Halyk’s Financial Department, said the tenge would be around 210/$1 by the end of the year compared to 183/$1 currently. That’s a drop of around 10%.

“In the last three days conditions in Tenge-denominated money markets deteriorated sharply,” Halyk Bank wrote.

“Such changes usually happen before devaluations: demonetization, declining demand for Tenge- denominated assets, the rising cost of holding Tenge mirrored by the rising costs of borrowing, all illustrating a loss of confidence and the deepening of the currency crisis.”

Sabit Khakimzhanov, head of research at Halyk Bank and author of the report, attributed the weakening of the tenge to rising interest rates, rouble trouble, and oil prices below $95 per barrel.

The note will have irritated the Kazakh Central Bank which has been denying that it is planning a second devaluation of its currency. Khakimzhanov said that, unusually, an unnamed party had been buying $200m worth of tenge every day. This, analysts suspected, was the Central Bank trying to shore up its currency.

And, rather mysteriously, a few days after it was put up on its website, the currency note disappeared. Analysts at Halyk Bank told the Conway Bulletin that it was a management decision to take down its report.

Earlier this year, the government devalued the tenge overnight by 20%.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Kazakhstan to enter WTO

OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan will have cleared all the hurdles to their eventual accession into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by the end of the year, media quoted deputy PM Bakytzhan Sagintayev as saying. This is important as Kazakhstan has been negotiating entry to the WTO since the 1990s.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)