Jusan Bank changes name, Almaty gets a new mayor

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited Kazakhstan on May 30 to meet with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and to participate in the Italy-Central Asia summit. This is Meloni’s first visit to Kazakhstan. Tokayev had visited Meloni in Rome last year. During the bilateral meeting with Kazakhstan’s counterparts, Meloni said “our relations are excellent and extraordinary.” On May 28, during an Italy-Kazakhstan business forum in Astana , Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov said that bilateral cooperation has “a huge potential.”

Serik Zhumagarin, the minister of economy, said on May 29 that Kazakhstan’s GDP is poised to increase by 6% in 2025. The Central Bank had said the day before that their GDP forecast would only reach 5%. In recent weeks, several analysts and research firms (from Halyk Finance to Fitch) had revised their forecast downwards to around 4%.

President Tokayev fired Almaty mayor Yerbolat Dossayev and appointed Darkhan Satybaldy to replace him on May 24. Observers had rumored Dossayev’s demise for days, but many were surprised that Satybaldy–a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, mayor of Turkistan, and deputy head of the presidential administration–was named to replace him.

The new Alatau City project could become a cryptocurrency hub, Zhaslan Madiyev, the minister of digital development said on May 29. The statement echoed an earlier statement by Tokayev to create a pilot project called CryptoCity. Alatau is a special economic zone located just outside of Almaty.

During a shareholder meeting, Jusan Bank was officially renamed Alatau City Bank, the lender said on May 28. Recently, Jusan had been at the center of a restructuring, with Kaspi.kz shareholder Vyacheslav Kim on track to buy a large stake in the bank. In 2022, investigations showed that Jusan was linked to former President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

OpenAI, the US-based company that owns ChatGPT, registered an LLP in Kazakhstan on May 27 and will now pay taxes for its services. Since 2022, Kazakhstan has adopted a tax on digital services, nicknamed the “Google Tax.”

The president of the Aktau port was arrested on May 29, sources told Kazinform. The company Port Aktau is a subsidiary of Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, the national railways. While the rumors have yet to be confirmed, the president of the port at the time of writing was Abai Turikpenbayev.

Azamat Sarsenbayev, a blogger in Aktau, was detained for 20 days on May 28 on charges of slander. The Aktau court ruled that he had disseminated false information about the country’s anti-corruption service, Sarsenbayev said during a live report.

A court in Almaty rejected on May 27 an appeal for the acquittal of Temirlan Yensebek, a satirical news editor, who had been sentenced to five years of restricted freedom (a form of non-custodial sentence) for “inciting ethnic hatred” earlier this year.

Authorities in Kyrgyzstan detained a number of journalists working for independent news outlet Kloop on May 28 and 29. In the past few years, since Sadyr Japarov’s coming to power, Kyrgyz media has been under pressure. Kloop faced both lawsuits and searches in the past two years.

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