JULY 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan has hired Citigroup, HSBC and JP Morgan to advise it on issuing a $1b Eurobond, Reuters reported quoting unnamed market sources. Kazakhstan has been saying for months that it is weighing up issuing its first sovereign debt since 2000.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Eurocopter Kazakhstan Engineering, a joint venture set up in 2011 between Kazakhstan and Europe’s EADS, plans to start making attack helicopters by the end of 2013, officials said in Astana. According to press reports Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are interested in buying the helicopters.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Infant mortality is an important benchmark for a country’s development, both economically and socially.
That’s why the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum includes infant mortality in its Global Competitiveness Index. That’s also why it matters that Unicef, the UN agency for children, reported on July 15 that Kazakhstan’s infant mortality has dropped by two-thirds since 1990.
Of course, it’s been all change in Kazakhstan since 1990 when it was a member of the Soviet Union. Back then, Nursultan Nazarbayev was chairman of the Kazakh Soviet. Almaty was the capital and the massive oil investments, funded mainly by foreign companies, were merely bare plans.
Now Kazakhstan is booming, economically, and socially.
Its public health service, though, is often derided as corrupt and inefficient so when Unicef said that infant deaths had fallen from 54 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to under 19 in 2012, it was consider something of a double success.
This is a clear boost for the Kazakh health service and, in economic terms, matches Kazakhstan’s development. That said, there is some way still to go. According to the World Bank, even the poorest country in the European Union, Bulgaria, has an infant mortality rate of roughly half that of Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kcell, the largest mobile phone operator in Kazakhstan, posted higher revenues in the first half of the year compared to a year earlier but slightly lower profit. Revenue for Kcell, a subsidiary of Swedish telecoms giant TeliaSonera, rose just over 4% to about $580m highlighting growth in the Kazakh mobile market.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kashagan, the giant oil field in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea, will produce its first oil by end of 2013, said the consortium developing the field, the North Caspian Operating Company. Kazakhstan has staked its future on the successful completion of Kashagan and has become frustrated over delays.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh deputy interior minister, Yerlik Kenenbayev, was badly injured in a car crash in north Kazakhstan. The crash killed Mr Kenenbayev’s wife and son. It, again, highlighted Kazakhstan’s poor road safety record. Mr Kenenbayev and his family had been travelling back to Astana.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — UNICEF, the UN agency for children, said Kazakhstan is on target to hit its millennium goal of reducing infant mortality to two-thirds its 1990 rate. In 2012, infant mortality in Kazakhstan was 19 deaths per 1,000 live births, UNICEF reported.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two of the key core strengths of Britain’s Virgin Group and its founder Sir Richard Branson are self-publicity and business acumen. It may be bringing both of these strengths to the Kazakh telecoms market.
Virgin Group spans a handful of sectors including trains, aviation, banking, travel, health clubs and telecoms. In 2011, according to its website, Virgin Group employed 50,000 people across the world and earned revenues of about $21b.
Perhaps its biggest assets, though, are the Virgin brand and a sense of flair. Sir Richard set up Virgin in 1970 and its slanted, hand-written logo is now recognisable around the world.
Virgin Mobile Central and Eastern Europe was one of the British companies that signed deals with Kazakh businesses during a trip to Kazakhstan by British PM David Cameron earlier this month.
Launched in 2012, Virgin Mobile Central and Eastern Europe is currently only offering a mobile phone service in Poland. This, though, could change.
It may just have been a so-called memorandum of understanding with Kazakh Telecom but this is still significant as it could mean a Virgin branded broadband and telecoms business offering services to people in Kazakhstan. As an indication of Kazakhstan’s development, Virgin’s potential entry is interesting and, possibly, significant.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 8 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — More than 200 workers at a subcontractor for oil fields service company Cape International Plc and Manpower Ltd in Atyrau, west Kazakhstan, went on strike for two days over job losses, media quoted the local prosecutor-general’s office as saying. The workers are employed on the Kashagan oil project in the Caspian Sea.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
JULY 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh authorities’ hunt for opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov has taken a distinctly geo-political twist.
On July 12, a court in Italy ruled that the Italian authorities had illegally detained and extradited to Kazakhstan Alma Shalabayeva, wife of Ablyazov, and their daughter. They had been living for several months in a villa outside Rome when armed, masked men detained them in a night raid at the end of May. Two days later they were on a plane back to Kazakhstan. Most standard procedures, the government has now said, were ignored.
Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, is suspected of ordering the extradition, although he has denied this.
Mr Alfano, the interior minister, is a close ally of Italy’s former PM Silvio Berlusconi who is often described as a friend of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Ablyazov is wanted in Kazakhstan for allegedly embezzling billions of dollars from BTA Bank, where he had been chairman before fleeing in 2009, and financing opposition forces. He is also on the run from British police for perjury.
Regardless of the row that has erupted in Italy, Ablyazov is still on the run. Until he is captured the Kazakh authorities will both pull in more favours across the globe and continue to pressure opponents at home.
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(News report from Issue No. 143, published on July 15 2013)
