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The Regions This Week
April 26, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Eurasia
BP and Azerbaijani national oil company Socar plan to start construction of a $1.8bn petro- chemical plant in Turkey at the end of 2020, ac- cording to Socar’s Turkey Enerjji project director. Construction is expected to be completed by 2023.
Ordinary Turkmen citizens are reportedly turning to smuggling Turkmen-made towels and bed- linen into Kazakhstan amid ongoing economic hardship. Informal Turkmen traders, mostly mid- dle-aged women, are apparently moving hundreds of such goods per single flight from Ashgabat to Almaty.
GM Uzbekistan started exporting cars to Kyrgyzstan. GM Uzbekistan has dubbed this year “the Year of Export Potential Development” despite facing continued issues over exporting its cars to Russia.
A court in Armenia ruled that the police must initiate a criminal case against protesters that blocked roads to the Amulsar project site, where miner Lydian Armenia CJSC is developing one of the country’s largest gold deposits, the company said. Access to Amulsar in south-central Armenia has been blocked for months by protesters who say the project will result in significant pollution in the locality, though this has been denied by Lydian.
Iran’s average goods and services consumer price index (CPI) inflation stood at 51.4% y/y for the first month of the new Persian year (started March 21), with food, beverage and tobacco prices jumping 85% y/y, the Statistical Centre
of Iran (SCI) reported. Iran is facing a perfect storm involving a severe currency devaluation amid tightening sanctions levied by the US and stagnating wages.
The Kazakh government set a goal to raise the volume of the Central Asian nation’s non-com- modity exports to $32mn by 2022, according to a recent government briefing. In 2018, that figure
stood at $23bn, including non-oil exports of goods at $15.7bn and services exports worth $7.3mn.
Police used tear gas and rubber bullets against
Georgian locals protesting against construc- tion works at the Khadori 3 hydropower plant
in Pankisi Gorge, a Muslim enclave in Georgia’s Caucasus mountains. Local inhabitants claim that the hydropower plant, the third to be built in the area, jeopardises the environment and destroys its tourism potential. The government has prom- ised to suspend construction works until “90% of the population agrees with it”.
South Korea’s SK Engineering & Construction (SK E&C) is to upgrade Uzbekistan’s Bukhara refinery, Business Korea reported. SK E&C and Uzbekneftegaz signed a $600mn contract on April 21. After the modernisation project is finish, the Bukhara plant will produce eco-friendly petro- leum products.
Turkmenistan replaced North Korea in bottom place in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index ranking of 180 countries from Reporters Without Borders. It has fallen two places from the 178th position it held in 2018.
Yet another standoff over disputed segments
of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border intensified tensions among locals. Residents of a Kyrgyz village reportedly blocked a road traversing the locality and vandalised several Tajik vehicles. In turn Tajik men broke a window of a car with a Kyrgyz licence plate, and briefly abducted an eight-year-old Kyrgyz boy.
Iran’s parliament passed a bill requiring the government to take firm steps in response to “terrorist actions” by US forces, state TV report- ed. The move was a retaliation against Washing- ton’s unprecedented blacklisting of the country’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO).