JUNE 14 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Almaty began the trial of Alim Khasenov, a former deputy head of Kazakhstan’s border guards service, for corruption, media reported. The case highlights endemic official corruption in Kazakhstan and problems at its border guards service. Mr Khasenov is charged with stealing $2m.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s ministry of agriculture has declared a state of emergency in two small areas near the border with China to cull cattle infected with foot-and-mouth disease, media reported. Roughly 2,275 infected cows have been killed already this year. Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease occur annually in Kazakhstan.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 14 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — At a meeting in Tashkent, Uzbek President Islam Karimov and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev called for the UN to investigate the potential environmental impact of proposed dams in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Water is a sensitive subject in Central Asia and can aggravate inter-country relations.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 12 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan intends to maintain a ban on US citizens adopting Kazakh infants, Raissa Sher, head of the commission for children’s rights at the Kazakh education ministry told media. The ban has been in place since July 2012 when two Kazakh orphans were found apparently abandoned in a care home in the US.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — In their hunt for former billionaire banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, the Kazakh authorities haven’t had it all their own way.
Ablyazov is the former chairman of BTA Bank who fled Kazakhstan after the collapse of the bank, one of the country’s biggest, in 2009. The Kazakh authorities accuse him of embezzling billions of dollars, plotting a series of bomb attacks in Almaty and trying to topple the government. He is currently on the run.
Many of Ablyazov’s former associates have been arrested recently, including Yerlan Tatishev, a former BTA Bank director. In May, the Kazakh security services secured the extradition from Italy of Ablyazov’s wife and daughter.
Now though, they’ve suffered a setback. A judge in the Polish regional town of Lublin rejected a request from Kazakhstan to extradite Muratbek Ketebayev, an associate of Ablyazov. Polish police detained him on June 13. The judge freed him two days later.
Mr Ketebayev had been a Kazakh deputy economy minister before fleeing Kazakhstan to Poland. Like Ablyazov, the Kazakh authorities have accused him of trying to overthrow the government.
According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Polish prosecutor released Mr Ketebayev because he felt the extradition request was politically motivated.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government wants to modernise its pension system. Among other things this means making women work five years longer until they are 63, in line with men.
The logic appears simple but the issue has hit a nerve and triggered a rare show of ground-level dissent.
But, if the public dissent was rare, the government’s climb-down has been little short of extraordinary.
On June 11 Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, ever watchful for an opportunity to flourish his man-of-the-people credentials, sacked labour minister Serik Abdenov who had been charged with pushing through the pension reforms.
Mr Abdenov had cut an increasingly forlorn and isolated figure. Audiences have openly laughed at him, he has stumbled over his words when trying to explain the reforms and a protester has pelted him with eggs.
But the climb-down didn’t stop there.
Mr Nazarbayev has also said that the entire pension reform needs to be looked at once again and suggested that the changes should come into effect in 2018 and not in 2014. Since Mr Nazarbayev’s intervention state-influenced media have been putting out stories suggesting that the pension reforms have gone too far.
In Kazakhstan, this is code for a rare government U-turn.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 13 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Perhaps looking to both its green credentials, the Kazakh authorities said they want to introduce bicycle-taxis from 2014, media reported. The first German-designed bicycle-taxis will trial in Pavlodar, north Kazakhstan, before appearing in Astana and Almaty.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two men shot dead Mukhit Kubayev, formerly Kazakhstan’s top aviation official, and Serik Bimurzin, a former world karate champion, on a remote stretch of road in western Kazakhstan, media reported. Police said that it was still unclear what the motive for the murders was.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The figures in the BP Statistical Review of World Energy can be dry but the stories behind the figures are important.
The 2013 edition is an important barometer for the energy-centric economies in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. The most telling figure for the region in this year’s edition of the review was that oil consumption in Kazakhstan grew by over 10% in 2012.
This is a large jump. In the countries covered in the review only Israel’s oil consumption increased at a higher rate. The global rise in oil consumption in 2012 was 0.9%.
The increase reflects Kazakhstan’s emergence from a sharp economic retraction triggered by the global crisis of 2008/9 when oil consumption fell.
Last year Kazakhstan, with a population of 17m, consumed 265,000 barrels of oil per day. By comparison, Uzbekistan, population 29.5m, consumed 82,000 barrels/day and Turkmenistan, population 5m, consumed 100,000 barrels/day.
Across the Caspian Sea, BP reported that Azerbaijan, population 9.3m, consumed 93,000 barrels of oil per day, a jump of 5.4%. This rise in Azerbaijan’s oil consumption, although not as big as Kazakhstan’s leap, still shows an increase in economic activity.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
JUNE 8 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Underlining increased investment in its transport infrastructure, a (relatively) high-speed train made its inaugural journey across Kazakhstan from Almaty to Atyrau on the Caspian Sea coast. The 2,600km journey, the longest in Kazakhstan, took 35 hours 30 minutes, down from 49 hours.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 138, published on June 10 2013)
