Extra

Human Rights Commissioner of Kazakhstan has sent a letter to the Ombudsman of the Kingdom of Thailand in which he asks to provide assistance in ensuring all-round and objective consideration of the incident connected by arrest of four Kazakh pilots.

It is like Doctor Faustus' pact with Mephistopholes: immediate benefit to be paid for in treacherous longer-term loss. But should the pact, preliminarily agreed upon between the current state-controlled board of BTA Bank, materialise, those who created the current mess will still be in charge of the process getting out of it. A mere glance at BTA's figures still looks very much like an anti-Hamlet scenario - with the Danish royalty surviving, Duncan holding the strings from abroad and no Fortinbras available to make a fresh re-start. Will the rest be silence...?

A ten-billion-dollar kickback is something in America these days is likely to be considered a mere trifle in the face of a multi-trillion black hole in the system. For Kazakhstan, the country's largest bank's misappropriation's costs are an open wound in the population's households that will keep bleeding for years to come. The key to the issue is the man who holds the dagger and his name is Mukhtar Ablyazov, now huddling up in the plush of London Town with the likes of his fellow embezzler Boris Berezovsky. Will he end up as a Kazakh variant of the latter, or as a Kazakh Khodorkovsky?

The first electric train in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region left Jinghe county in northwest Xinjiang at 11:00 in the morning on Friday, bound for the town of Horgos, on the Chinese border with Kazakhstan, according to a report from cnr.cn.

BP sold its interest in Kazakhstan's Tengiz oil field and the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to Russian Lukoil, as it completed the long-awaited exit from Kazakhstan.