Oil-rich Azerbaijan had its first Facebook-organized rally last Friday.
According to Amnesty International information, about 300 people gathered in the city’s Fountain Square for a rally held by the Musavat opposition party. Several people were also detained on their way to the event by the police.
“There is no justification for heavy-handed tactics to be used against obviously peaceful protestors,” said Natalia Nozadze, Amnesty International’s Azerbaijan expert who was present at the protest.
The second-largest Indian steel producer is seeking to purchase at least two coking coal mines in Mongolia and build one US$3 billion factory.
According to the Steel Authority of India Ltd., the company aims to buy one mine itself and another through a venture with other state-run metal and energy companies.
Mongolia, holding the world’s largest deposit of steelmaking raw material, is seeking developers to help it feed demand for raw materials from its neighbors, while maintaining control over the deposits. The Tavan Tolgoi region holds more than 6 billion metric tons of coal in the deserts of southern Mongolia.
Mongolian state-run Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi is expected to appoint banks to manage an IPO worth up to US$5 billion for the world’s largest unexploited coking coal deposit, a source close to the matter told reporters.
More than 150 investment banks from Wall Street, Europe and Asia-Pacific made pitches to the Mongolian government over the past few days to win the coveted underwriting mandate for the Tavan Tolgoi coal mine. Sources said a decision is expected within two weeks.
Kazakhstan’s long-serving president Nursultan Nazarbayev on Monday asked a constitution council to examine a proposed referendum on another decade of unchallenged rule, which would allow him to bypass two elections and lead the country unopposed until 2020.
On December 27, the Central Election Commission registered a statement by the initiative group in favor of such a plebiscite, which was endorsed by both houses of parliament. In their letter to Nazarbayev, the legislators asked him “to support the initiative to call a national referendum on the following question: Do you accept the law on Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, envisaging the possibility of extending in a national referendum the powers of the first president of Kazakhstan?”
Azerbaijan has agreed to supply crude oil to Belarus on behalf of Venezuela and, in return, the Latin American country will meet Azerbaijan’s oil export commitments to the United States, state-run energy company SOCAR said.
“We signed swap deals between Azerbaijan, Belarus and Venezuela on oil supplies in the amount of 5 million tons of oil per year from 2011,” the head of SOCAR, Rovnag Abdullayev, said Monday.
Mongolia’s government is reviewing a list of more than 1,700 mining licenses for possible termination under regulations aimed at environment protection, a senior official told reporters.
The suspended gold projects were said to contravene the country’s new Water and Forest Law, which bans mining activities in water basins and forest areas of the landlocked country, where water is in scarce supply.
Turkmenistan is ready to provide the European Union with some 40 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually for the Nabucco gas pipeline project.
“Given the domestic consumption in the west of the country and gas supplies from there to Iran, we will have 40 billion cubic meters of gas annually for export, so that European countries do not have to worry,” Turkmenistan’s Deputy PM Baymurad Khodzhamukhamedov said at the Oil and Gas Turkmenistan-2010 Forum in Ashgabat.
Mongolia’s aggregate industrial output and external trade turnover have increased remarkably over the first 10 months of 2010, official statistics show.
From January through October, the total industrial output increased by 177.2 bln.tog or 13.2 percent to 1.517.4 bln.tog compared to the same period the previous year.
French Alstom together with Kazakh Railways Temir Zholy (KTZ) and Russian Transmashholding (TMH) set up a joint venture that will supply 295 electric locomotives to the Kazakh railway company.
Earlier this year, the memorandum of cooperation was signed in Almaty. Kazakh Railways confirmed their electric locomotive order for a total of €1.3 billion. Alstom evaluates its share of the contract at approximately €800 million. The contract will take effect March 11, 2011.
The Ukrainian government has decided to liquidate its unprofitable coal mines, closing down 107 of them in 2010.
“The government funds which was use to spent on unprofitable mining enterprises support will be going to modernization of those mines, which can be successfully privatized in the near future,” a government official explained.