OCT. 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kcell, Kazakhstan’s largest mobile operator, added nearly 175,000 subscribers in the third quarter of 2013, the company said. Controlled by Sweden’s TeliaSonera, Kcell now has 14.25m subscribers. The importance of the Kcell data is that it shows the mobile sector in Kazakhstan is still growing.
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(News report from Issue No. 157, published on Oct. 23 2013)
OCT. 16 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Just who is going to succeed the long-standing Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev is the biggest political issue in Kazakhstan.
Mr Nazarbayev, 73, has led Kazakhstan since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. He has shaped Kazakhstan. The physical apex of Mr Nazarbayev’s power is his presidential palace, the Akorda, in the centre of Astana.
One of Mr Nazarbayev’s headaches, though, is the succession issue. He doesn’t have an obvious successor capable of holding together Kazakhstan’s notoriously fractious clans.
This means that when Mr Nazarbayev shuffles his lieutenants, it attracts close attention. So, when he pulled the career diplomat Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, 60, from United Nations in Geneva and appointed him to head the Senate, Kazakhstan-watchers started talking about succession.
It’s a familiar position for Mr Tokayev who had been Speaker of the Senate between 2007 and 2011. He has also previously served as PM and foreign minister.
And Mr Tokayev’s promotion to head the Senate is important. According to the constitution, if Mr Nazarbayev couldn’t run the country, for whatever reason, the Speaker of the Senate would take over.
Whether or not that means he will take over the presidency when Mr Nazarbayev finally retires is another question. There’s no doubt, though, that there is still a lot of conjecture and so-called Akorda-ology to come.
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(News report from Issue No. 157, published on Oct. 23 2013)
OCT. 23 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will open an embassy in South Africa this year and an embassy in Ethiopia in 2014, marking a decisive diplomatic push into sub-Saharan Africa.
It’s a relatively natural link. Kazakhstan has built up its wealth through the extractive industries. Mining is also important to the economies of sub-Saharan Africa.
Over the last three years or so, Kazakhstan has steadily expanded its diplomatic missions across the world. It has opened up embassies in key emerging market countries such as Indonesia and Brazil and upgraded offices in long-established missions such as in London. It already has embassies in Cairo and Tripoli.
The push into South Africa fits this pattern. It is a growing economy with a large mining component. Establishing a mission in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is more political, though. Addis Ababa is home to the African Union. By setting up a mission there, Kazakhstan hopes to earn influence within this political block.
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev plans to open the embassy in South Africa when he visits for the first time in December.
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(News report from Issue No. 157, published on Oct. 23 2013)
OCT. 14 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Igor Larra, a reporter for the independent Svoboda Slova newspaper in the city of Aktobe in northern Kazakhstan, has died of injuries he sustained when a group of unidentified men attacked him in August, media reported. News websites said that the attack may have been linked to his work.
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(News report from Issue No. 156, published on Oct. 16 2013)
OCT. 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A gas leak halted output at the Kashagan oil field in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea for the second time in the past few weeks, media reported. Production facilities at Kashagan cost $50b and took 13 years to build. The oil field started production in September and is key to Kazakhstan’s export aspirations.
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(News report from Issue No. 156, published on Oct. 16 2013)
OCT. 10 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Bulat Utemuratov, a confident of Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, signed a preliminary agreement to buy Temirbank and Alliance Bank from the Kazakh government. The Kazakh government bailed out the banks during the 2009 global financial crisis. It owns 67% of Alliance Bank and 79.9% of Temirbank.
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(News report from Issue No. 156, published on Oct. 16 2013)
OCT. 7 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a high-profile corruption case, police charged the former head of Kazakhstan’s Statistics Agency, Anar Meshimbayeva, with stealing 758m tenge ($4.9m) from a budget allocated for a national census in 2009. Ms Meshimbayeva fled Kazakhstan but was arrested in Moscow earlier this year and deported back to Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
OCT. 9 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Momentum is building inside Kazakhstan’s parliament to pass a law that restricts homosexuals. Homosexuality has been legal since 1998 in Kazakhstan but a handful of lawmakers want to reverse this. Earlier this year Russia banned so-called homosexual propaganda.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
OCT. 3 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Samruk-Kazyna, the Kazakh sovereign wealth fund, is continuing to dispense its non-core assets, managing director, Nurlan Rakhmetov, said in a media interview. Mr Rakhmetov said 409 of 560 non-core assets, such as nursing homes and hotels, had already been dropped. Samruk-Kazyna manages roughly $80b worth of assets.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
OCT. 8 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kashagan oil field in the Caspian Sea, vital to Kazakhstan’s long term energy plan, has resumed production after a gas leak halted operations for a week, media quoted energy minister Sauat Mynbayev as saying. He said Kashagan was now producing 61,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd). Commercial output is considered 75,000bpd.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
