KazMunaiGas to lay off 25% of its headcount

KazMunaiGas National Oil and Gas Company will lay off 25% of its staff within the nearest two month, Newskaz.ru reports, quoting the Company’s Head Lyazzat Kiinov as saying February 13. “KMG will make 25% of its staff redundant; we’ll have yet to see whether such measures will be taken in the Company’s subsidiaries”, Mr. Kiinov told journalists on the sidelines of the Government sitting. “People directly related to production processes will not be affected”, he elaborated. January 27, 2012 President Nazarbayev instructed Umirzak Shukeev, Head of Samruk-Kazyna Sovereign Wealth Fund, “to optimize the headcount of ministries, regional governors’ offices … optimization is not the goal in itself. We should get rid of those who don’t work hard”. “[Recently appointed to the position] Mr. Shukeev has seen how many highly-paid penpushers are employed with companies that are part of the Samruk Kazyna Fund (…) The Vice Prime Minister is to come up with recommendations of how to optimize national companies and government-owned enterprises”, President said at that time. “For the recent five years the number of state-run enterprises has grown 1.5 times – from 4000 to 6000. Because the Finance Minister has been too generous when managing public funds. No suggestions have been made on how to save public funds. These enterprises employ 6 times more people than all public bodies – 600 000 people! Over half of the enterprises are loss-making (…) We need to drastically cut down the number of government-owned enterprises and optimize the structure of national companies by April 1. From the budget perspective, it’s important to cut down the headcount without using the freed resources to raise salaries for the other employees”, Head of State said.