The head of Swedish-Finnish telecoms giant TeliaSonera, Lars Nyberg, has resigned after an auditor found the company was negligent when purchasing mobile licenses in graft-saturated Uzbekistan.
The 2007 deal was thrust into the spotlight in September, when Swedish journalists accused TeliaSonera of paying some 2.2 billion Kroner ($337 million) to a small, offshore company linked to President Islam Karimov’s daughter, Gulnara Karimova.
Mannheimer Swartling, which carried out the review for TeliaSonera, found no evidence of bribery or money laundering, but said “the suspicions of crime expressed in the media and by the Swedish Prosecution Authority cannot be dismissed by this investigation.”
Biörn Riese, a lawyer for Mannheimer Swartling, “notes that the transactions have been surrounded by so many remarkable circumstances that at least someone should have reacted to the lack of clarity regarding the local partner,” the firm said in a February 1 statement.
“If one carries out business in a corrupt country, one should quite simply be more thorough than TeliaSonera has been,” Riese said.
Last month documents surfaced showing TeliaSonera knew it was dealing with Karimova, who has been described in US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks as a “robber baron,” for the way she uses her father’s leverage to take over profitable businesses in Uzbekistan.
One of the interesting questions brought up by the recent elections held in Israel is if the new government that's being created there can somehow help improve the country's still extremely strained relations with Turkey. Although Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu will again be prime minister of the new government, the emergence of the centrist Yesh Atid ("There is a future") party, which will play a key role in whatever coalition Netanyahu puts together, puts forward the possibility that Israel's foreign policy could stop the rightward drift that it took under former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, something which could have a positive impact on relations with Turkey.
Writing in the Hurriyet Daily News, Tel Aviv University-based researcher Gallia Lindenstrauss takes a look at the possible Yesh Atid effect:
Yesh Atid followed the growing trend in Israel of having journalists as key party members (in comparison, there was a sharp decline in ex-army personnel who were elected). In addition to the party chair, Yair Lapid, who was a columnist and television anchorman before entering politics, another new Yesh Atid member of Parliament is the newspaper and television commentator Ofer Shelah. Shelah is notable since he helped draft the platform for security-related issues in the Yesh Atid party’s program. While these issues were not the main focus of the party’s campaign (and in general were not the key issue of the elections) they are likely to reemerge both in discussions surrounding forming a coalition government and later on.
Last week, Open Democracy Russia ran a very good series of articles on relations between Russia and China. One was especially interesting for EurasiaNet readers, about choices that the Central Asian states are having to make between integration with Russia or China. The piece concentrates on the economic sphere, in which, as the authors convincingly argue, integration with the two big superpowers is becoming mutually exclusive.
Of course, Russia and China also have their respective Central Asia integration schemes in the security sphere: China has the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Russia the Collective Security Treaty Organization. So I asked one of the piece's authors, Raffaello Pantucci, an expert on Chinese-Central Asian relations, about whether there was going to be a similar reckoning in that sphere. Short answer: no. His more detailed thoughts:
The Bug Pit: Is there a similar looming choice to make for the Central Asian states, whether they prioritize ties with the SCO (dominated by China) or CSTO (dominated by Russia)?
Uzbekistan is seeking to get mine-protected vehicles, small arms, and even helicopters and drones from NATO forces who are using its territory for logistics support in Afghanistan, the New York Times has reported. That Uzbekistan is seeking some sort of leftover weapons is old news; this has been discussed (publicly) for more than a year. But the Times story provides a lot of new detail on what in particular Uzbekistan might be looking for, and it looks like they're aiming their sights high:
[T]he Uzbeks have been broadening the scope of their demands, said a senior American official directly involved in the diplomacy of the Afghan logistical routes, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations.
The requests have gone from relatively common items like night-vision goggles to large and expensive American-made goods like MRAP vehicles, the 14-ton armored utility trucks that help protect troops from roadside bombs.
Other items that the Uzbeks have eyed in the American arsenal in Afghanistan are small arms, mine detectors, navigation equipment and possibly drones, according to Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, suggesting that the Uzbeks are looking at the pullout next year as a sort of everything-must-go moment for military shopping.
And Uzbekistan isn't just looking to the U.S., but Germany, too:
After years of watching helicopters fly in and out of Termez airfield, which is used as a German base in Uzbekistan, the government in March told Germany’s defense minister, Thomas de Maizière, who was visiting, that it would not mind getting its hands on a few of them, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported....
Such talks have alarmed members of the German Parliament, who requested clarification from their government.
The World Economic Forum, the meet-and-greet extraordinaire held each year in the Swiss town of Davos, will hold a retreat in Baku, Azerbaijan this April.
Azerbaijani officials and pro-government media are already blowing the trumpets to announce that the skyscraper-studded Azerbaijani capital will, once again, host a shoulder-rubbing of the rich and the powerful. The World Economic Forum has confirmed the plans to EurasiaNet.org, but has not specified further details.
Apart from all the various opportunities that the WEF event may bring to Azerbaijan, the conference comes as another PR success for the energy-rich country, which has been snagging quite a few high-profile international events of late, ranging from the Eurovision Song Contest and the United Nation's Internet Governance Forum in 2012 to the European Olympics in 2015.
And, with a presidential election down the road, Azerbaijani officials are not inclined to be modest. The decision to hold the Davos event in Azerbaijan is a testimony to the country’s growing influence on the international arena, said Ali Ahmedov, executive-secretary of the ruling Yeni Azerbaijan Party.
“This decision also proves that the international community highly evaluates the economic reforms held in Azerbaijan under the leadership of President Ilham Aliyev,” Ahmedov was quoted by News.az as saying.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov has labeled 2013 the “Year of Prosperity and Wellbeing.” Starting today, prosperity is best measured in bricks of small-denomination Uzbek sums.
The streets of Uzbekistan’s cities have long been home to a thriving black market cash exchange, where dollars are worth approximately 40 percent more than in banks. Unsurprisingly, that’s kept hard currency out of the hands of central bankers.
Uzbekistan's Central Bank says it is moving to "improve" regulations regarding the sale of hard currency by making it basically impossible to buy dollars, euros and the like, starting February 1. Its new protocols are based on a "thorough" study of local and foreign practices, the Bank says.
Previously, any adult Uzbek citizen had the right – theoretically – to purchase foreign cash of up to $2,000 in value per quarter at the official exchange rate. To ensure no one got more than his or her fair share, the bank made notes in each citizen’s passport with details of the transaction, including the date.
Because it is so much more valuable outside on the street, the hard currency was in high demand. So the banks rarely had enough cash for more than a few customers per day. Late on January 31 in Tashkent, for example, commercial banks were advertising dollars at 2,038 sums (advertising, not necessarily selling), while the black market rate was about 2,800 sums to the dollar. (The highest-denomination sum note is 1,000, meaning stacks of bricks are required for many purchases.)
The substantive rate difference spawned all sorts of schemes, your correspondent can attest. At many banks women (at least it always seemed to be gangs of women) would queue from early in the morning, intimidating, with the help of police and bank security, any one else trying to buy dollars. Those dollars, most Tashkent residents believe, quickly ended up on the black market.
There is an interesting piece posted recently on Foreign Policy’s website that highlights how authoritarian-minded leaders in Eurasia are becoming adept at leveraging thuggish behavior.
The article, titled “The League of Authoritarian Gentlemen,” is written by Alex Cooley, a Central Asia specialist at Columbia University. It examines the ways in which Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have used the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to stifle dissent.
Human Rights Watch has just released its annual World Report and its chapter on Turkey contains some very strong criticism of Ankara's efforts at human rights reform. “Despite some moves for reform, the efforts have been patchy, incomplete, and the new human rights mechanisms are under government control and lack independence,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, HRW's senior researcher in Turkey. “If the government is serious about its latest moves to address the Kurdish issue in Turkey, freeing the thousands of detained peaceful Kurdish political activists, journalists, human rights defenders, trade unionists, and students would be a good first step,” she said. “Turkey needs to make human rights a priority in its approach to all of its citizens.”
In Turkey, the cross-party work on a new constitution during 2012 was a positive development, Human Rights Watch said. But tight government control of appointments to the national human rights institution created in March and the ombudsman office established in June undermined confidence in potentially important oversight mechanisms. There are serious concerns about how independent or effective either institution will be in practice.
Turkey’s restrictions on freedom of expression are evident both in its laws and in the pattern of prosecutions and convictions under these laws, Human Rights Watch said. Judicial reform packages passed by the parliament, most recently in June, suspended prosecutions and convictions for some speech offenses, amended penalties for various terrorism laws, and attempted to curb excessive detention on remand, but have not yet had a significant impact. Politicians’ intolerance of dissenting voices – extending as far as criticizing television soap operas – and their willingness to sue for defamation perpetuates a chilling climate for free speech.
A wedding is usually a special day for two people in love. But in the land of The Protector, three’s the charm.
Couples tying the knot in the famously overbearing state are now being forced to pose for their keepsake photo before a portrait of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the Chronicles of Turkmenistan reported this week.
The website, run by Turkmen exiles in Vienna, says couples who want to register their marriage have to pay photographers at registry offices – known as Palaces of Happiness – for a photo album containing at least three photos of the newlyweds taken with a portrait of The Protector, as Berdymukhamedov likes to be known.
It is unknown whether the gimmick was dreamed up by registrars and photographers as a money-making scam or whether orders were received from on high to insert The Protector into every couple’s married life. But the report says the new requirement has appeared not only in the capital, Ashgabat, but also in other major towns.
Berdymukhamedov has slightly less of a reputation for eccentricity than his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, whose antics included building a giant golden statue of himself, which rotated with the sun, and renaming months after himself and his family. Yet Berdymukhamedov is no shrinking violet: Like his predecessor, who went by the title Turkmenbashi (“Head of the Turkmens”), all over the country The Protector has plastered photos of himself staring down upon his subjects. He even appears as a dashboard good-luck charm in taxicabs.
Armenia and Georgia, neighbors that compete over just about anything, from cuisine to culture, now seem to be going head to head over press freedom. Key media-freedom watchdogs seem to diverge about which of the two countries should take the lead in the South Caucasus.
For years, Georgia has carried the torch for media freedom in the region, a place that is hardly a bulwark of independent or high-quality media to begin with. But, according to the latest press freedom charts by the Paris-based Reporters without Borders, Armenia has taken over the baton.
The country was placed 77th in a ranking of 179 countries, 33 notches above Georgia, and way ahead of neighbors Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran.
Reporters without Borders wrote that both Armenia and Georgia “enjoy broad media pluralism and a low level of state censorship, but they still face important challenges concerning media independence and the working environment of journalists" who are "often treated as easy prey by a variety of pressure groups."
Ahead of Armenia's February 18 presidential election, the powers-that-be are dominating mainstream media, but face bold criticism by a variety of smaller news outlets. Yet despite this dynamic, Armenia is still considered as “not free” by Washington, DC-based Freedom House, and is placed behind “partly free” Georgia.
In its last assessment, which focused on events in 2011, Freedom House said that Georgia, with its increasingly competitive media environment, is still the regional leader.
