Letters to the Editor | 19 May 2007

More power to Kazakhstan

Sir: Elliot Wilson rails against the alleged bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism that he argues are strangling business opportunities for foreign investors in Kazakhstan (Business, 28 April). But his three examples of Western companies who have ‘decided to leave’ are misleading.

PetroKazakhstan, which emerged from nowhere as Canadian-based Hurricane Oil, was very happy to sell its Kazakh assets to the Chinese national oil corporation in 2005 for more than $4 billion. The same is true of Nations Energy, which in 2006 was sold by the owners for almost $2 billion. And far from being pushed out by fickle Kazakh bureaucrats, British Gas took a strategic decision to sell its share in the Kashagan oilfield, at a healthy profit, because it wanted to focus on a massive Karachaganak gas field in western Kazakhstan, believed to be the largest foreign operation of the company.

There is, of course, room to further improve conditions. But there would hardly be so many international investors in the country if conditions were as Mr Wilson has described them.

Ambassador Erlan Idrissov
London SW7

Patient explanation

Sir: The health minister Andy Burnham takes me to task for my piece about the rise of the SNP in Scotland (Letters, 12 May). The average hospital operation wait is a fortnight longer than under Thatcher’s years, I said. England’s wait has improved, he says. He has perhaps forgotten that England runs out just north of Berwick. Thereafter lies Scotland, where the median inpatient hospital wait since 1990 has risen from 30 days to a scandalous 43 days. Proof, perhaps, that cash without reform doesn’t work.

Fraser Nelson
London SW1

Grass roots

Sir: Paul Johnson’s invocation of the lawn (And another thing, 12 May) as England’s contribution to European vistas was underlined recently when the Italian foreign minister, Massimo d’Alema, spoke at St Antony’s College, Oxford.