Tag Archives: Kazakhstan

European bourse signs up to Kazakh carbon scheme

MAY 27 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan has taken another big step towards opening Asia’s first carbon market. The European Energy Exchange (EEX), based in Leipzig in Germany, said it had signed a deal with company called Caspi JSC to help develop the carbon emissions trading scheme, media reported.

A carbon emissions market has existed in Europe for several years and Kazakhstan wants to tap into this knowledge. It’s an ambitious project but one that would benefit both Kazakhstan’s environment and its profile in Asia.

Media quoted Yelnar Nadyrgaliyev, chairman of the board of Caspi JSC.

“EEX has high expertise in operating a regulated market for emissions trading,” he said. “We are pleased to be able to benefit from that as this will be a crucial success factor in establishing an emissions market in Kazakhstan.”

Kazakhstan signed up to the Kyoto Protocols in 2009. This is the international standard, named after the Japanese city in which the treaty was signed, by which countries measure their carbon emissions output. They pledged to reduce them to below 1990 levels.

Kazakhstan is still pumping out roughly 20% less carbon emissions today than it was in 1990, when big business was booming during the Soviet Union, but since the mid-2000s its output has shot up by 40%.

Perhaps understanding that action was needed, and probably with an eye on the green agenda of his centrepiece EXPO-2017, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev introduced a cap on emissions by the country’s top 178 companies.

These companies need to, theoretically, buy credit to increase emissions. Not surprisingly, they’re not happy.

Regardless, signing up EEX, Europe’s largest power market, is an important step to creating a genuine carbon emissions trading market in Kazakhstan.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Kazakhstan increases penalties on terrorism crimes

MAY 23 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh lawmakers have drafted a new bill which will impose a prison sentence of up to six years on anybody who fails to report information on attacks linked to terrorism, media reported. Critics of the bill say a new law could be abused by the security services.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Kazakhstan delays Uzbek car import ban

MAY 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan delayed a ban on imports of cars lacking some safety features from the GM car plant in Uzbekistan, media reported, a boost for the Uzbek car-making sector. Earlier this year reports said that the Nexus and Matiz models would be banned from January. The ban will now not be imposed until July.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Russia’s Crimea grab impacts north Kazakhstan

PAVLODAR/Kazakhstan, MAY 28 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Vitaly couldn’t get his words out fast enough. His jowly cheeks seemed to wobble with enthusiasm.

“Yes, if Putin did say that he wanted northern Kazakhstan we would support it,” he said. Putin was a reference, of course, to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

His friend shot him a quick look and interjected.

“But we’re happy to be part of Kazakhstan too. This is our home,” he said, shoving his hands into his tracksuit trousers. “Pavlodar is a comfortable place to live.”

The men, who were in their mid-20s, were standing on a scruffy street near the centre of this city of 330,000 people in northern Kazakhstan. It was built by the Russian empire on the banks of the serene Irtysh River which flows more than 4,000km from western Kazakhstan, into Russia’s Siberia and the Ob river system that eventually disgorges into the Arctic Sea.

From Pavlodar, the Russian border is barely 100km away.

Since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March, attention in Kazakhstan has focused on its northern regions. Here ethnic Russians outnumber Kazakhs and Russian, not Kazakh, is the main language spoken. Firebrand Russian politicians have urged Putin to turn it into Russia.

Pavlodar feels harmonious but there is an underlying tension that is not hard to find. And it worries people.

Anara, an ethnic Kazakh lawyer, was walking home from work along one of Pavlodar’s wide, tree-lined streets.

“People have always lived well together but after Crimea people are talking about it. What happens if Putin decides he wants to take northern Kazakhstan?” she said. “In Pavlodar and Petropavlovsk the main language is Russian. He could do it.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Son in law of Kazakh President sells gold mines to Russia

MAY 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russian gold mining company Polymetal paid the equivalent of $619m for two gold mines in Kazakhstan belonging to Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, Reuters reported.

Half the fee will be paid in shares in the new gold mine company called Kyzyl Project.

Mr Kulibayev is one of the most influential and high- profile businessmen in Kazakhstan. He has also been touted, by some, as a potential successor for his father- in-law. His main asset is Halyk Bank, one of the biggest banks in Kazakhstan. He owns a majority stake alongside his wife, Dinara Nazarbayeva, Mr Nazarbayev’s second daughter.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Kazakhstan fights terrorism – linked crimes

MAY 27 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Almaty sentenced a 29-year-old man to seven years in jail for calling on Kazakhs to support militant Islamists fighting in Syria. Kamil Abdulin was found guilty of spreading terrorist propaganda and citing religious discord. Kazakhstan has increased penalties on people found guilty of terrorism-linked crimes.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Kazakhstanis protest against Eurasian Union

MAY 27 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Astana detained 20 people demonstrating against the proposed Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), two days before Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan planned to sign it into existence. The EEU is designed to replace the Customs Union. Some analysts have said that it will morph from an economic club into a political group.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)

Uzbekistan joins rugby group

May 16 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The International Rugby Board (IRB) has accepted Uzbekistan’s rugby association as a full member, media reported. Rugby is in its infancy in Uzbekistan but the IRB has said that it is committed to spread it across Asia. Neighbouring Kazakhstan is already an IRB member.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)

Improved loan book boosts Kazakh Halyk Bank

May 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Halyk Bank, the second largest bank in Kazakhstan, said its profit in the first three months of the year had almost doubled. Importantly, Halyk said much of this profit increase was due to a fall in the amount of poor loans on its books, an issue Kazakh banks have been grappling with since the 2008/9 economic crisis.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)

Police jailed for torturing detainees in Kazakhstan

May 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – In 2013, Kazakhstan convicted 31 policemen of using torture, media reported.

This is an important statistic as it shows that the Kazakh authorities are not just paying lip service to the idea of reducing the use of torture by the security forces to obtain confessions, a routine criticism of Central Asian states by human rights groups.

The deputy prosecutor of Kazakhstan, Zhakyp Asanov, said that the number of investigations against Kazakh police in the past five years had increased tenfold. This, he said, underlined Kazakhstan’s commitment to improving human rights.

“We react to reports of torture immediately and take all required measures to investigate the report,” Mr Asanov said. Of course these actions are welcome and there are signs that this more humane approach to detainees is taking shape in Kazakhstan.

Earlier this year, a Kazakh court upheld a compensation claim ordered against the police for the torture of a man held in detention in March 2007.

That said, there is a lot more to do. Torture as a method to extract confessions from detainees is still fairly routine in Kazakhstan, rather than being isolated incidences, as Mr Asanov’s figures tend to suggest. Prison conditions are also considered poor.

In a report in 2013, Amnesty International said it “accused the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, of pulling the wool over the eyes of the international community in his government’s promise to eradicate torture and fully investigate the lethal force by police.”

Its report described torture as rife in Kazakh detention centres.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)