Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan brings Tleuberdi back from Vienna to run its foreign ministry
Mukhtar Tleuberdi, foreign minister from 2019 to 2023 and ambassador in Vienna since then, was appointed foreign minister again by decree on Wednesday. His is the first ministerial name of the government whose prime minister the Kurultai approved on Monday, on day 3 of the 10 days the law allows.
KazMunayGas settles its yuan bond today at less than half the coupon of the dollars it is buying back
Wednesday is the day the two money tracks touch: 3.5 billion yuan of new bonds settle at 2.3% and 2.8%, and the early deadline for tendering the company's 5.375% dollar notes closes at 17:00 New York time. The gap between the two coupons is the price Kazakhstan's oil company now puts on borrowing in Beijing's currency.
Kazakhstan fills both posts in a morning, and the ten-day clock starts
The Kurultai approved Yerlan Karin as vice-president and Olzhas Bektenov as prime minister on 31 August, and Tokayev signed both appointment decrees within hours. The resignation Bektenov handed in on Friday lasted 3 days. The message is continuity; the new fact is the seat built beside the presidency.
The rule leaves, the money stays
COP17 closed with $1.3 billion in restoration and drought finance and no drought framework. The instrument fight moves to Egypt in 2028, and Central Asia spends the pause competing for discretionary money it helped argue into existence.
Tokayev gives the Security Council its own apparatus
While the chamber waits for a prime minister's name, the president spent Saturday building a state body: the Security Council's apparatus, directly subordinate and accountable to him.
The Kurultai builds itself in an afternoon, and the government's clock waits on two names
Kazakhstan's new parliament finished its own construction on Friday: a speaker elected by secret ballot, three deputy speakers, 8 committees, all inside the opening sitting. The executive it faces stayed unbuilt. President Tokayev accepted the Bektenov cabinet's resignation in the morning and told deputies he will submit a prime minister and a vice-president once the chamber's structure stands, which by late afternoon it did.
The Kurultai sits, and the government's mandate returns
Kazakhstan's new single-chamber parliament convened at 11:00 in Astana on Friday, 145 deputies seated and 110 of them from one party, with three acts on its opening table: a speaker to elect by secret ballot, the Bektenov cabinet's mandate to receive, and a first bill the president has already named.
Central Asia puts its law up for rent
Three states have now built four enclaves where their own law steps aside for England's, on leases running to 2066, 2074, 2076 and the year 2100. The rents are real, the tenants are arriving slowly, and the length of the leases is the most honest document the region has published about itself.
The chamber that begins with children
A supermajority parliament's first announced act is a bill about minors. That choice is the most legible thing about it.
The ADB puts $400 million behind the region's border queues
The Asian Development Bank approved on Thursday a $400 million regional facility, BUILD, to modernise border crossings across the 11 CAREC countries, with up to $50 million per project over 10 years. The priority projects named so far are Tajik: Fotehobod-Oybek on the Uzbek border, Sarazm and Navbunyod.
Astana holds an Uzbek scholar on a spying charge, and neither capital will say why
Ikboljon Qoraboyev, a professor of international relations at Maqsut Narikbayev University in Astana and a citizen of Uzbekistan, has been in custody since 3 July under article 176 of Kazakhstan's criminal code, espionage, his family told the BBC's Uzbek service. Nearly 8 weeks later no institution in either capital has said what he is accused of doing.
The Kurultai gets its names, and its first bill is about children
Kazakhstan's five parliamentary parties published their deputy lists ahead of Friday's opening session, and Tokayev has told the new chamber what he wants on its desk first: a ban on social-network registration for anyone under 16.
The biggest container line stops booking Novorossiysk
MSC suspended new bookings to and from Novorossiysk with immediate effect after a strike on one of its ships bound for the port. At the grain quay in the same harbor, repairs are now priced at up to four months.
The region's fuel backstops harden into the supply plan
Ukraine's drones stopped Lukoil's NORSI refinery on Wednesday, and Reuters counted the wider score: every big Lukoil plant in Russia now stands idle. For Central Asia's importers, the hedges assembled this summer, Chinese contracts, an Iranian request, third-country cargoes inside a Russian commitment, now read as the base case.
KazMunayGas starts building a yuan book on its home exchange
The national oil company opened books on Wednesday for two tranches of yuan bonds on the Astana International Exchange, with settlement set for 2 September.
The Kokzhide file opens, and the water tests positive at all five operators
A court order has pried loose the state's own hydrogeology report on Kokzhide, Kazakhstan's largest reserve of fresh groundwater. It shows oil products above permitted levels at wells of every company drilling there.
Five Years Ahead: one ring, four sets of numbers
The August blackout found Central Asia's power ring rebuilt in copper and broken in bookkeeping. Which one gets fixed first will decide what the next fault costs.
Kazakhstan's new chamber sits on Friday
President Tokayev signed a decree on Wednesday convening the first session of the 145-seat Kurultai for 11:00 on 28 August in Astana. When the chamber sits, the Bektenov cabinet's resignation falls due.
The port war now runs on both shores of the Black Sea
Russia says it struck cargo vessels and fuel storage at Ukraine's Pivdennyi and Chornomorsk ports on 25 August, extending a campaign against Ukrainian harbours it has run since mid-July. Across the water, Russia's own grain terminals at Novorossiysk are idle for a third week, and moving Kazakh oil through the same sea still costs nearly $400,000 a day.
A Kazakh refinery turns north, and the minister calls the terms normal
Kazakhstan's energy ministry says an arrangement is in place under which the Kondensat refinery in Aksay keeps up to 30% of its petrol and diesel at home and sends the rest to Russia. The tonnage is small. The direction, with Russia's own petrol exports banned into 2027, is the news.