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Eurasia
March 2, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 23
“The people of Kazakhstan do not want a Ukrainian scenario in the country,” Nazarbayev - who has also ordered all parliamentary hearings to be held in Kazakh, said early in 2016 - promising to punish anyone who might try to pursue a Euromaidan-type event in his country.
Highway building halted amid Turkmen budget woes
bne IntelliNews
Turkmenistan’s budget woes have hit a new low with Turkish construction company Polimeks de- ciding to halt the construction of a toll road from the Turkmen capital Ashgabat to the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi, a report by opposition-run news website Chronicles of Turkmenistan said on February 27.
The company no longer felt it necessary to follow through with its end of a contractual obligation when the Turkmen government tried to convince CEO of the Turkish company Erol Tabanca that he should build the road with his own funds in return for later reimbursement by the government based on toll- revenues expected in the future, the report said.
Tabanca has reportedly decided to halt his coop- eration with Turkmenistan and leave the Central Asian country. Turkmen officials apparently at- tempted to prevent him from boarding a plane out of Turkmenistan, accusing him of a failure to fulfill contractual obligations and “fleeing” the country, the report said. That led to a brief fight between his bodyguards and the Turkmen side, which
The country even quietly passed a new military doctrine last year, which appears to heavily suggest prioritisation of defence against potential threats from “global powers” at Kazakhstan’s borders, which can only refer to Russia or China. But China has not shown any sign of regional military ambitions concerning Kazakhstan.
Turkmenistan's oil and gas wealth funded exotic monuments like the entrance to the Caspian city of Turkmenbashi, but now the funds are drying up.
ended after the Ashgabat mayor Shamukhammet Durdyliyev interfered and Tabanca promised to return to Turkmenistan "in the near future".
Given the drying up of Turkmenistan’s budget revenues amid a low hydrocarbon-prices-driven economic crisis, Polimex and other subcontrac- tors have not received payments for construc- tion works already commissioned, Chronicles of Turkmenistan’s reporters discovered. Payments on a new $2.3bn airport and several facilities built in the run-up to the $10bn Asian Games have not materialised.
The report also lends credence to suspicions by some analysts that the Turkmen segment of the $10bn Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline might not be under construc- tion and may not yet have actually reached the Afghan border from the giant Galkynysh gas field.
The Turkmen government has adopted multiple desperate measures to rescue the country’s budget including completely suspending Visa