The cabinet's own words first, from the meeting Economist.kg reported on 26 August: first deputy prime minister Daniyar Amangeldiev and deputy prime minister Erlist Akunbekov sat down with the agencies and the fuel traders to discuss «uninterrupted fuel supplies, price stabilisation and support measures for oil traders». The same day resolution 579, signed by Adylbek Kasymaliev, fixed the reference prices for the subsidy: $960 a tonne for AI-92, $1,050 for diesel, $650 for autogas, valid to 31 December 2026 and in force from 1 August.
Now the first number against it. The National Statistics Committee's August price for AI-92 is 89.11 som a litre, printed to the tyiyn. July was 87.83. In the first month behind the wall, the month the wall was backdated to cover, petrol rose 1.46%. AI-95 rose 0.53% to 109.27. Diesel slipped 0.17%. Since January the three lines are up 16.58%, 33.58% and 25.22%.
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Take the arguments one at a time.
The wall holds prices. A reference price is a promise about the treasury's payment to importers. Read the published sentence again: compensation will be calculated as «the difference between the fixed price set by the cabinet and the actual cost of the imported fuel». An importer whose tonne lands above $960 is compensated. What happens to an importer whose tonne lands below $960, the published description does not say, and that silence is the whole subject of this column, because on the only public price we have, the second case is the one September opens with.
The reference is the import price. The Russian exchange is the only public number we have for what a tonne costs at the Russian end. On 1 September the St Petersburg exchange's national index printed AI-92 at 75,477 roubles a tonne, a record, which is $874 at the Russian central bank's rate of the day. That is $86 under Bishkek's reference before a wagon has moved. Rail from the refineries costs something, and nobody has published what; the desk holds no contract and no invoice, and neither do you. Diesel printed 71,221 roubles, $825, against a reference of $1,050: a gap of $225 before transport. On those two numbers the subsidy for September is a small sum or a nil return. The pump price rose anyway.
The money is flowing. About 1 billion som had gone to the oil traders by 21 August, Economist.kg reported; the exact figure logged on 25 August is 956.1 million, $11 million at the National Bank's rate. Against what? Kyrgyzstan uses about 2 million tonnes of oil products a year, some 165,000 tonnes a month. If the billion paid for one month of the country's fuel it would come to $66 a tonne; if it settled July's claims under the earlier version of the scheme, it says nothing about August. By the resolution's own clause a month's claims are due by the 25th of the next, so August's bill falls due by 25 September, and the first month behind the new wall has not been invoiced yet.
The refineries will take the load. The other promise sits in a supplement the National Investment Agency signed on 25 August with the company behind the Junda refinery at Kara-Balta: 800,000 tonnes a year of capacity, $193.75 million of promised investment in Euro-5 output, and a 31 July deadline in the original agreement that had already passed when the supplement was signed.
Output tells a different story from the paper: petrol production rose 89% in the first half of the year to 129,790 tonnes, diesel 85% to 128,452. And in August, for the first time, 35,000 tonnes of Russian crude reached a Kyrgyz consignee by Kazakh pipeline and rail through the Shagyr loading point, a route the dollar wall does not touch, because crude is not on the subsidy list. Where that crude went and at what price, nobody has published; KazTransOil's statement, as Kazakhstan Today printed it, names neither the shipper nor the buyer.
That is $86 under Bishkek's reference before a wagon has moved.
The invoice will show it. The electronic invoice, ÐСФ 2.0, was to cover fuel from 1 September by the schedule the desk logged in August; the act that put it into force has not surfaced in anything the desk could open.
Three documents would settle it. The text of resolution 579 itself, which the desk could not extract from the Ministry of Justice database. The register of compensation claims by company and by month, which the clause on the 25th implies exists and which nobody has printed. And an invoice, any invoice, showing what a tonne of AI-92 cost landed in Bishkek in August. None is public.
Until one of them is, the wall is what it says on its face: a date, and a price in someone else's currency.
Aigerim Bekova writes on the political economy of Central Asia for Central Asia Wire. The views expressed are her own.