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The Regions This Week
July 26, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Eurasia
Azerbaijan’s national oil company Socar is turning to Russia to supply the new $6.3bn refinery it built near Izmir in Turkey because crude shipments from one of its preferred suppliers, Iran, have been ruled out due to US sanctions.
The Kazakh government-backed mining company Eurasian Resources Group (ERG)
is looking into options for a potential sale of its assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter. China Nonferrous Metal Mining is among companies interested in purchasing the assets, the sources said.
Iran indicated it wants to swap the two captured tankers at the centre of the British-Iranian crisis. Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, told
a weekly cabinet meeting: “We do not seek the continuation of tension with some European countries. If Britain steps away from the wrong actions in Gibraltar [in which Royal Marines seized Iranian tanker Grace 1], they will receive an appropriate response from Iran.”
Uzbekistan is planning to sell most of its thermal power plants to private investors within the next few years in order to help develop the electric power sector, Xinhua news agency reported, citing comments made by Sherzod Khodjayev, Uzbekistan’s deputy minister of energy, to a round table on the energy sector.
The jailed former president of the world’s big- gest uranium producer Kazatomprom, Mukhtar Dzhakishev, was denied early release for a second time, according to a ruling by Judge Ermek Shymy- rov in a court in the northeastern city of Semei. Rights groups say Dzhakishev is in need of urgent medical assistance, which he has been denied.
The head of the Tajik government’s Committee on Architecture and Construction, Jamshed Ahmad- zoda, denied rumours of damaging accidents at Tajikistan’s Rogun hydropower plant’s construc-
tion site, Asia-Plus news agency reported. Since the beginning of 2019, there have been rumours of “significant damage” at the construction site alleg- edly caused by calculation errors made by experts from Italian company Salini Impregilo, contracted to build the dam, the report said.
Georgia’s central bank kept its refinancing rate unchanged at a hawkish 6.5%. The national lender is targeting 3% annual inflation. Cuts to 6.75% in January and 6.5% in March were made by the rate-setters.
Mongolia’s foreign trade surplus stood at $1bn in the first half of 2019, up from the $822.2mn record- ed in the same period of 2018, according to latest figures published by the Mongolian state-run statis- tics office. The surplus expanded thanks to growth of 10% y/y in exports to $2.9bn in the period, which partially rose on the back of growing coal exports.
Kyrgyzstan's former president Almazbek Atambayev left the country aboard a private jet headed to Moscow. The visit came after Atambayev refused to obey three subpoenas in an unspecified criminal investigation. Under Kyrgyz law, refusal to obey two subpoenas makes a person liable for forcible detention for questioning.
Armenia should be an industrial state, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said during a visit to the Gyumri Technology Centre in Armenia’s second city. He pointed out that during the last 30 years since the collapse of communism industrial zones had be- come commercial spaces, and that Armenia "should reclaim its own glory as an industrial country”.
World Bank vice president for Europe and Central Asia, Cyril Muller, visited Uzbekistan to discuss new and existing areas of World Bank financial and technical assistance. As part of the visit, Muller participated in a signing ceremony for loan and grant agreements for World Bank-supported projects in Uzbekistan amounting to $656mn.