Insights

As the Central Asia’s largest and richest country, Kazakhstan has a lot of natural advantages for the development of renewables, including 3,000 hours of solar radiation a year and the average annual wind speed of nine meters per second in some parts of the country.

On 23-25 April, the English Law Summit was held in Astana and Almaty, where GRATA International Law Firm took an active part.

As the Central Asia’s largest and richest country, with a Muslim-majority population of around 18 million people, Kazakhstan wants its local Islamic banking industry, as an alternative source of capital for SMEs, to reach 3-5% of its total banking assets by 2020 from 0.08% in 2015.

In this article, SHAIMERDEN CHIKANAYEV outlines some of the key legal developments and challenges faced by the Islamic finance market in Kazakhstan in 2017 and provides an overview of some of the major factors that will shape the Islamic finance industry's growth and trends in Kazakhstan in 2018.

GRATA International contributed to LexisNexis Mergers & Acquisitions Law Guide 2018. The publication is featured under the Special Focus - One Belt One Road China Investment section.

GRATA International performed exceptionally well in this year’s rankings as its Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan offices were ranked by Chambers Asia-Pacific 2018, confirming GRATA International's dominant position in Central Asia.

Since 1991, Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s largest economy and oil producer, has had to rely on the deteriorating infrastructure it inherited from the Soviet Union. As a result, nearly every piece of public infrastructure (e.g., roads, hospitals, power plants, kindergartens, sewerage) in Kazakhstan requires a different degree of upgrading or expansion. It is expected that proper PPPs and project finance deals will finally take off in Kazakhstan in the near future, firstly because proper legislation on PPPs has been put in place in 2015 and, secondly, after decades of neglect, the government of Kazakhstan has finally not only declared, but seems to confirm its readiness to improve the investment climate and to attract private investments through PPPs (including into the housing and utilities sector) and decided to invest at least part of the wealth from commodity exports in long-postponed infrastructure projects.

On 2-3 November 2017, the XII Forum of Corporate Lawyers was held in Almaty. GRATA Intenrational took part in the Forum as speakers.