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The Regions This Week
May 11, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 8
Eurasia
Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal and moved to reimpose the heaviest sanctions on Tehran. The other major power signatories to the accord—the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China—are now on a collision course with Washington as they intend to stay in the deal. That might involve immunising their companies active in Iran against sanctions.
Trump’s nuclear deal pullout endangers Iran’s plans to source $200bn of investment for its oil, gas and petrochemical industries and wrecks its move to spend $38bn on Boeing and Airbus aircraft purchases. Airbus uses US parts so needs American licensing. French energy major Total, Volkswagen, Peugeot maker PSA Group and Siemens are other companies involved in Iran which may be exposed to coming US sanctions. US National Security Advisor John Bolton told reporters the US Treasury Department would allow up to 180 days for foreign companies that do business with Iran to end their contracts.
South Africa’s mobile operator MTN Group fears that under a current fixed schedule it will struggle to repatriate profits of €200mn because of the heavy sanctions to be reimposed on Iran by Washington.
Iran’s pragmatic-centrist President Hassan Rouhani, who helped negotiate the deal, is now exposed to the hardliners who say he should never have trusted the US. Iranian MPs set fire to a paper US flag and the text of the nuclear deal in Parliament amid shouts of “Death to America!”
Chairman of Iran’s Parliamentary Economic Commission Mohammad Reza Pour-Ebrahami said that Iran has experienced some $2.5bn in capital flight via cryptocurrencies. Iranians are looking for ways to protect their assets with the Iranian rial having sunk to a record black market low amid Iran’s nuclear deal troubles with the US.
Government-owned Iran Tobacco Company (ITC) signed an agreement with an Iranian firm
representing Philip Morris International (PMI)
to produce Marlboro cigarettes.
People’s champion Nikol Pashinian was voted
in as Armenia’s new prime minister by MPs following weeks of massive street protests
against cronyism and corruption which forced predecessor Serzh Sargsyan to leave office. Pashinian spoke on the phone with Vladimir
Putin and agreed Russian-Armenian ties should be strengthened. He also called for the de facto leaders of the Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway region to be invited to conflict resolution talks with Azerbaijan. And on his third day as PM Pashinian had his country’s top police chief and national security advisor fired. Pashinian has pledged that there will be no oligarchs in his cabinet.
Azerbaijan is moving to tax cryptocurrencies.
A profit tax and income tax will be levied on legal entities and individuals, respectively.
S&P Global Ratings affirmed the ‘BB-/B’ ratings of Georgia and said the outlook was stable. Georgia's growth is set to remain strong and
its IMF programme should mitigate balance of payment risks and act as a fiscal policy anchor, it said
Safe sex became the latest battleground in deeply Christian Georgia's culture wars after
a court effectively outlawed a brand of condoms featuring religious jokes. The Aiisa (Georgian for “that thing”) company produced the supposedly irreverent prophylactics. One takes the tagline “I’d jerk off, but it’s the Epiphany”.
A Kazakh court ordered the release on parole of Oil Construction Company (OCC) labour union leader Amin Eleusinov. Eleusinov was jailed for two years as part of a crackdown aimed at trade unions - he was charged with embezzlement and publicly insulting, assaulting and refusing to obey a state authority representative.