Turkmenistan's president has fired the head of the oil and gas sector that accounts for over 90 percent of the isolated country's exports, state media reported Thursday. The Central Asian country's state-controlled Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper said Yashigeldy Kakayev, who was deputy prime minister in charge of the oil and gas complex, was set to be demoted.
The newspaper cited President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov as complaining of "shortcomings in supervision" of the sector on the part of Kakayev, who took the job in 2015 after holding several other high profile energy-related positions in the state over the last two decades. But Berdymukhameov pledged to "use [Kakayev's] experience" to help "prepare new projects" to deliver gas from the country's vast Galkynysh natural gas deposit, the paper said.
Maksat Babayev, who headed the country's state energy champion Turkmengaz, will now take over one of the most important positions in a country where Berdymukhamedov is both president and head of the cabinet. Berdymukhamedov also fired deputy prime minister for agriculture Redjep Bazarov, in the most significant cabinet changes since he cruised to an effectively uncontested victory in a presidential vote in February. Esenmyrat Orazgeldiyev, a former head of one of the country's regions, will now replace Bazarov, who was fired for "unsatisfactory work". Turkmenistan, a country of more than five million people bordering Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has been under economic strain since natural gas prices began a long slump in 2014.