APRIL 24 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Kazakh air force MiG-31 fighter jet crashed on a training mission in central Kazakhstan killing the pilot and injuring the navigator. The Kazakh military grounded all MiGs after the accident while an investigation takes place.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 133, published on April 29 2013)
APRIL 26 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A man protesting against a proposed increase in the retirement age for women hurled two eggs at the Kazakh minister for labour, Serik Abdenov. The Kazakh government wants to raise the retirement age for women to 63 from 58.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 133, published on April 29 2013)
APRIL 27 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s prosecutor-general wants to change the face of policing in the country. By 2020, media quoted deputy Prosecutor-General Zhakyp Assanov as saying, women will make up roughly 30% of the Kazakh police force, up from today’s figure of about 3%.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 133, published on April 29 2013)
APRIL 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The European Parliament adopted a resolution criticising Kazakhstan for not respecting political, media and religious freedoms. Its statement called for the authorities to release the leader of the banned opposition Alga! Party, Vladimir Kozlov, from prison. He was convicted last year for inciting unrest.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
APRIL 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Snow covered the Almaty street, reflecting the light pouring from the restaurant’s windows.
Inside, vodka flowed, dancers twirled and laughter boomed.
This was a typical Chechen wedding party in Kazakhstan on a freezing evening in February.
The women wore their hair loose; the men strutted and joked as they tried to impress.
Across Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, a proud, flamboyant Chechen diaspora is acutely visible.
Worried that the unruly Chechens would rebel while the Red Army was fighting the Nazis, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported roughly 500,000 people from the North Caucasus to Central Asia in 1944. In 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, the Soviet authorities eased movement restrictions. Many Chechens opted to return home. Many others, though, stayed.
But despite the suspected Boston bombers’ Chechen ethnicity and upbringing in Kyrgyzstan, these communities do not hold particularly radical Islamic beliefs.
Radical Islam is a danger to Central Asia but the risk from Chechens already living within the region is low. The main danger lies in the flow of radical beliefs from places like Makhachkala — the teeming capital of Dagestan and apparently where the suspected Boston bombers lived after leaving Kyrgyzstan — to poor, vulnerable ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
APRIL 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh police detained Yerlan Tatishev, a former director of BTA Bank which the government bailed out in 2009, on embezzlement charges, media reported. BTA Bank’s former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, is currently on the run having been found guilty of perjury by a British court.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
APRIL 16 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — China has shown interest in buying shares in the Kashagan oil project in the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan’s oil and gas minister, Sauat Mynbayev, told reporters, comments that will cause concern in Delhi.
Potentially favouring China over India for a 8.4% stake in Kashagan (that the US oil company ConocoPhillips is selling) would cement Kazakhstan’s relations with its powerful neighbour and confirm Chinese dominance over the Kazakh energy sector.
China owns roughly a third of Kazakhstan’s energy reserves and is building a series of pipelines to ensure Kazakh oil and gas continues to flow east.
For India, losing out on a slice of the Kashagan project, the biggest oil field discovery in 40 years, would be a blow to its stated strategy of expanding its energy reserves abroad. India has been relatively slow to invest in the Caspian region’s energy projects and is trying to play catch-up.
ONGC, the state-owned Indian energy company, thought that it had secured a $5b deal to buy the stake from ConocoPhillips last year.
Kazakhstan, though, has the final say on who owns stakes in Kashagan and its intervention in a deal that India thought, and hoped, was done could be ONGC’s undoing.
Kazakhstan has until the end of May to decide who to award the stake to, or keep it for itself. Mr Mynbayev said simply that the best offer would win.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
APRIL 19 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The largest stake-holders in Kazakh miner ENRC, Alexander Machkevitch, Alijan Ibragimov and Patokh Chodiev, said they were considering teaming up with Kazakhstan’s government to buy back the company. ENRC is listed in London and is the subject of a corporate governance review.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
APRIL 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Production of steel, one of Kazakhstan’s most important exports, continued to fall, official statistics showed. In Q1 of 2013, Kazakhstan produced 22% less steel than in the same period in 2012. Analysts blamed the fall on a drop in global demand and sanctions imposed on Iran.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
APRIL 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kazakh government announced that it had lifted a moratorium on granting more licences to subsoil developers, underscoring the sector’s importance for Kazakhstan’s future development.
Minerals and energy have been the backbone of Kazakhstan’s economic boom since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and that is not likely to change.
Global demand for metals may have dropped but lifting the ban, which was introduced in 2008 to allow a smooth introduction of new tax codes, will still spur foreign investor interest in Kazakhstan. The country simply holds too much untapped mineral wealth to be ignored.
And the Kazakh minister for new technologies and industry, Asset Issekeshev, immediately invited foreign companies to apply for licences at a tender in May.
Most of the $170b foreign investment in Kazakhstan since 1991 has been in the energy sector although senior government officials told Reuters the emphasis now would be on metals and non-hydrocarbon minerals.
To further encourage this, the government suggested that miners may be exempt from VAT.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 132, published on April 22 2013)
