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The Regions This Week
February 9, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 10
Eurasia
Describing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s out of the blue announcement of a snap presiden- tial election as a farce, several opposition parties said they would boycott the April 11 poll.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said it is vital Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other military branches sell off their mas- sive business holdings and commercial assets to help save Iran’s economy. Iran’s largest state pen- sion fund and other government branches must also withdraw from their commercial holdings including energy assets, he said.
French state-owned investment bank Bpifrance
is to offer euro-denominated credits to Iranian buyers of its goods. The move would facilitate trade that would be beyond the reach of unilateral US sanctions which bar Iran from dollar-based trading. Bpifrance says French exporters have lined up potential deals with Iran worth around €1.5bn.
A man wearing a shroud and armed with a ma- chete was shot in the leg and detained after trying to enter the presidential complex of Hassan Rou- hani in north Tehran.
Iran is to exempt 2.3mn low-wage Iranians from income tax. That might relieve some of the social tension over economic hardship that ignited a nationwide wave of street protests in the country around the turn of the year.
Targeting the "public display of the attributes and outward signs" of "destructive religious move- ments", Kazakhstan is to bar Muslims from wearing heavy beards and ankle-length pants. The Salafi branch of Islam is under fire in the country.
A $115mn “Happy Land” amusement park complex to be built near Almaty in Kazakhstan was compared to a “Disney” by officials. It will include a spa & resort hotel and a golf course.
CIS amusement park chain owner Happylon will partner in the project.
The EBRD approved a $214mn loan to finance the 280-MW Nenskra hydropower project in Geor- gia. Locals, mostly subsistence farmers, oppose the project, fearing reduced river flows will affect crops and that residents will lose land plots.
Kyrgyz officials discussed a new Kyrgyz-US co- operation agreement as part of a visit by Henry Ensher, deputy assistant secretary at the US State Department's Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Kyrgyzstan terminated the last agreement in 2015 in protest at a human rights award.
Mongolian lawmakers approved a proposal to
set a new immigration cap aimed at protecting job prospects for domestic workers. The move would limit the number of new resident permits for foreign or stateless people to only 100 per year across 2018-2020, and allow China and Russia just 30 immigrants each.
Mongolia is pushing a four-year programme to
boost its cashmere industry in order to diversify its mining-dependent economy. The country is the world's second-largest producer of raw and washed cashmere. The goat population amounts to 27mn and annual cashmere production capac- ity stands at 9,400 tonnes. Only 10% is processed within the country. The programme wants to drive that figure up.
Fitch Ratings affirmed the long-term issuer default ratings of three Uzbek banks with sta- ble outlooks. The banks and their ratings were Ipak Yuli (IY) bank and Trustbank (TB) at ‘B’, and Universal Bank (UB) at ‘B-’. Fitch said the banks’ “credit profiles are unlikely to deteriorate signifi- cantly in the medium term, supported by continu- ing economic growth in Uzbekistan (Fitch fore- casts 6% GDP growth per year in 2018 and 2019) and generally reasonable pre-impairment profit buffers.”