Nazarbayev says no more pompous conferences

Nursultan Nazarbayev demanded to stop holding pompous conferences and meetings, Tengrinews.kz reports from the meeting of Kazakhstan government with participation of the President. The President instructed to optimize budget costs. “It is necessary to clearly understand how much we are spending on things that do not create the economic growth or jobs. There are several of them. First of all, we need to decrease the expenses on holding costly and useless events a lot of which we have had recently. Many people come to Kazakhstan for free stuff. We meet them, receive, it has become a normal course of things. As soon as the economy improved a little we started holding many anniversaries, pompous conferences, international meetings. Right now the ministries and city administrations have over 3 thousand of such events planned. All that needs to be stopped. Just cut it out. It’s not the time yet,” Nursultan Nazarbayev said on January 27. “We need to continue creating macroeconomic conditions for countering the crisis and maintaining the economic growth,” he mentioned instructing on an optimization of expenses. According to the Head of State, current global conditions may provoke devaluation of the currencies of Kazakhstan’s trade partners. The National Bank and the Government were instructed to monitor this situation to ensure optimal tenge exchange rate for competitiveness of the commodities of Kazakhstan exporters. According to Nazarbayev, the whole financial sector has to be prepared for crisis. “I know that the government and the National Bank are working on that. The next week I expect the report on what exactly is done about the problematic banks and on the system in general,” the President said.