COPENHAGEN, Denmark — It’s an inevitable fact of life for female politicians: people are bound to pay more attention to your looks, style and spouse than they would if you were a man.

Hillary Clinton is an obvious victim.

Another is Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s woman of the moment.

Ever since last week’s parliamentary election, Thorning-Schmidt, 44, has been engaged in high-stakes negotiations to form a government in Denmark. If, as expected, this savvy and brilliant politician succeeds, she will become the Scandinavian country’s first female prime minister.

She will also likely be the first head of state for whom Google returns the term “naked” (nogen in Danish) as a top search suggestion — as Danes learned from the country’s Ritzau News Agency in August, just as the campaign got going.

She shrugged off the matter.

In 1999, when she was campaigning for her first seat in the European Parliament, her boss at the time, Freddy Blak, gave her the nickname Gucci-Helle, for her handbag habit. When she returned to Copenhagen to lead the centre-left Social Democrats six years later, the name came with her. With her intellectual background, large townhouse in one of Copenhagen’s toniest districts, and penchant for handbags, the 44-year-old has always seemed an unlikely leader for the Danish left.

Blak recalls admonishing her when she was having problems connecting with voters.

“I said, ‘Helle, you must put your finger in the earth and know the people you are talking to,” he told GlobalPost. “You can’t talk to uneducated people and wear clothes that cost more than they earn in a whole month.’”

She looked him up and down, and then shot back.

“Well, we can’t all look like shit like you.”

The incident demonstrates that, elegant as she is, Thorning-Schmidt is much more than a pretty face.

She has shown herself to be a tough and effective negotiator. She used these skills first to bring her flailing party together, and later to forge an unlikely coalition with the free-market Social Liberals and the hard-left Socialist People’s Party.

In other words, she rose to power through sheer power of persuasion.

To do this, she turned her weakness — shallow roots with the center-left Social Democrats — into a strength. As a relative outsider, she deftly played the compromise candidate between the party’s left- and right-wing camps, healing a schism that had crippled it for years. As party leader her weak links to the left allowed her to reach out to the free-market Social Liberals, to form the coalition that last week ousted the Danish centre-right after a decade in power. The ecstatic cheers and chants of “Helle, Helle, Helle” as she came out to greet her supporters close to midnight on Sept. 14 showed that there is real gratitude for this feat.

In reality, it was her coalition partners — the Social Liberals and far-left Red-Green Alliance — that are responsible for the victory, claiming 17 and 12 additional seats respectively; her own party scored a net loss of one seat. Her partners’ new strength will add to the challenges she is facing in the closed-door negotiations on a common coalition program.

The opposition is predicting a debacle. “It will of course be a disastrous situation for Helle Thorning-Schmidt,” Morton Messerschmidt, a leading face of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, told GlobalPost. “We will have a very internally divided government, seeing as it is the most radical and extreme parties that seem to be the big victors. I think we will have elections very soon, perhaps in a year.”

Thorning-Schmidt’s advisors say she hopes to ask Denmark’s Queen Margrethe to formally instate her some time before the end of September. Publicly, she has given herself until Oct. 4 to form a government, so she clearly doesn’t expect it to be easy.

Denmark has been hit harder by the financial crisis than any other country in Scandinavia. Thorning-Schmidt urgently needs to get her far-left and pro-free market allies to agree on a balance between stimulus and spending cuts. They face thorny issues such as pension and benefit reform, longer working hours, and tax hikes.

Complicating this is the fact that one of her allies, the Social Liberals, helped draw up the last government’s austerity bill, which will be the first piece of legislation to go before the new parliament.

The left-wing Social People’s Party wants to fight it, and Thorning-Schmidt herself vowed to stop it during the campaign.

The chances are that the parliament will pass austerity, against her wishes.

Voters found Thorning-Schmidt’s alternative plan — centered on a scheme for every Dane to work an extra 12 minutes a day — unconvincing, said Michael Ulveman, a political consultant who was spokesman for Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a Danish prime minister from 2001 to 2009.

“After 10 years, people wanted new faces, but they didn’t buy into the new government’s economic policy.” He estimates that out of Denmark’s 179 new MP’s, 108 are in favor of the former government’s austerity bill. What many voters disliked about the last government was its far-right ally, the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party. The DPP’s draconian policy affected not only refugees seeking access to the wealthy Scandinavian nation, but also thousands of Danes who have married people from outside the European Union. They have become “love refugees,” forced to live across the border in Sweden or Germany because of laws that prevent their spouses from getting residence rights.

As prime minister, Thorning-Schmidt would face pressure to reform these laws. But doing so is fraught with danger, as many Danes remain uncomfortable with immigration. One in eight support the Danish People’s Party.

Blak believes his protege has what it takes to face her formidable challenges. He says Helle is “very, very clever,” adding that she “has a good political nose and she’s good at negotiation. It will be difficult for Helle, but I’m sure she will be a fantastic prime minister.”

Blak is not Thorning-Schmidt’s only mentor. Her British father-in-law, Neil (now Lord) Kinnock, spent seven years leading the U.K.’s Labor Party against Margaret Thatcher, one of the toughest politicians of the last century.

Thorning-Schmidt met Stephen Kinnock when both were studying at the College of Europe, the elite training center for the European Union’s political class. This in itself doesn’t play well in a country at best ambivalent to European government.

But last year, just as she was talking about a new tax on millionaires, it emerged that her husband, who certainly qualifies as one, paid no tax in Denmark at all. Instead he opted to pay the dues on his generous salary from the World Economic Forum in low-tax Switzerland.

An inquiry concluded that, as he lives in Geneva during the week, this was as it should be. But the episode left a lingering sense that Thorning-Schmidt was not a “real” left-winger.

Her husband disappeared from view throughout the campaign, but the smears kept coming. The confidential report of the inquiry into his tax affairs was leaked in the last days of the campaign. And then, in the days before the election, came stories that her marriage was in trouble, and even that Stephen was secretly gay.

“It is very unpleasant that newspapers print such rumors,” Thorning-Schmidt told Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet newspaper. “I can only say it is not true.”

Being part of the Kinnock dynasty has its advantages though. The elder Kinnock had reportedly advised his daughter-in-law throughout the campaign. He had a lot to teach her. He too took the lead of the opposition in 1983, in the middle of an economic crisis. He too fought a battle to tame the militant left.

He may also have given her lessons learned from his old sparring partner, Margaret Thatcher.

After all, for all the talk of ‘”Gucci Helle,” Margaret Thatcher’s handbags remain the most famous in political history.

So strong a symbol did the Iron Lady’s bags become that, in 2000, when she auctioned for charity a bag she had brought to a meeting with President Reagan at the White House, it fetched $130,000.

In 2005, that’s exactly how Thorning-Schmidt got rid of her infamous Gucci bag, auctioning it off and giving the proceeds to charity.

The move succeeded in showing her sense of humor. But it didn’t manage to shake the “Gucci Helle” nickname.

All over the Swedish port city of Malmö last week there were gaggles of students clutching brand-new laptops given to them on loan for the start of the school year. As schools fight over what, due to a demographic blip, is a declining number of students, the device you get has become a keen area of competition.

“I’ve just got a mini-HP, but you can pay a bit more and get a Mac or an iPad,” says Moa Stanbery, 16, who has just started at ProCivitas, the most popular of the town’s profit-making free schools.

Students arriving at the Thoren Business School have to make do with a Dell. But Pauli Gymnasium, the biggest municipal-run school, this year decided to give MacBooks to all its students to stave off private competition.

What few of the students know is that the ultimate cause of their good fortune – the competitive system of free schools Sweden pioneered in the early 1990s – is under assault.

SNS, a prominent business-funded thinktank, issued a report last Wednesday that sharply reversed its normal pro-market stance. The entry of private operators into state-funded education, it argued, had increased segregation and may not have improved educational standards at all.

“The empirical evidence showing that competition is good is not really credible, because they can’t distinguish between grade inflation and real gains,” Dr Jonas Vlachos, who wrote the report on education, told the Observer.

The report had a huge impact. It was a top story on Swedish television, and was hotly debated the next day in the newspapers. How the debate plays out will be watched carefully by education experts in the UK, where 24 free schools, built on the Swedish model, opened this year.

Peje Emilsson, the founder of Kunskapsskolan, a private school company, attacked the research, deriding it as the worst report the thinktank had produced in 20 years.

But Vlachos, an associate professor of economics at Stockholm University, is standing his ground. His argument is based on his finding that students who entered gymnasium [sixth form] from free secondary schools on average went on to get lower grades over the next three years than those who had entered with the same grade from municipal secondary schools.

Vlachos suspects that, because schools rather than external examining boards mark students, free schools are more generous than municipal schools in the grades they give. “There’s been tremendous grade inflation in Swedish schools,” he said.

Sweden’s path-breaking educational reforms of the 1990s have come under question since last December when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment.

This showed that Swedish students had dropped to 19th place out of 57 countries for literacy, to 24th in maths, and to 28th in science. This compared with 9th, 17th and 16th in studies done in 2000, 2003 and 2006 respectively.

And Swedes, used to coming near the top of just about every human development index, were appalled.

Jan Björklund, the minister of education, moved to tighten central control over schools and is soon to launch a parliamentary inquiry into competition and free schools.

“Loopholes in the legislation have meant that free schools can elect not to have a library, student counselling and school nurses,” he complained. “And as they get just as much money as the municipal schools, the owners have been able to withdraw the surplus.”

For now, Swedish parents and students still support the 1990s reforms and neither Björklund, nor the opposition Social Democratic party, are considering reversing them. But a poll carried out this year by Synovate found that Swedes who want to ban companies from operating schools for profit now outnumber those that don’t.

Vlachos believes that the economic thinking underlying free schools is simply wrong. “It’s very difficult for people to make an informed choice of what’s a good school and that’s not conducive to a well-functioning market,” he said. Part of the problem is that students’ priorities aren’t always economic priorities. “There’s been an explosion of media courses and arts courses such as singing and dancing,” Vlachos said. “They’re not necessarily bad, but it’s not obvious that all these things are stuff that we want to subsidise with taxpayers’ money.”

The other problem is unintended side-effects that damage society, such as increased segregation. This issue becomes glaringly obvious if you visit the two sixth forms in Malmö’s Western Harbour, a development of IT office space and tasteful eco-housing built on the city’s redundant shipyards.

The first, ProCivitas, has some of the highest entry grades of any school in the city, and draws in some of the most ambitious teachers. There are only a few immigrant faces, teachers wear suits and the atmosphere in its bright, airy central lobby is like that of a trendy design company.

At Kunskapsgymnasiet, just five minutes’ cycle ride away, the atmosphere could hardly be more different.

Students lounge around in groups smoking and playing cards. Well over 60% are from immigrant or refugee families. Kristoffer Osterman, one teacher I spoke to, sports a hippie beard, long ginger hair, jeans and clumpy boots.

ProCivitas students have an average of 280 out of 320 points, the highest in the city, whereas at Kunskapsgymnasiet the average for social sciences is only 180, with some students getting in with just 65 points.

This has nothing to do with the schools’ managements. In Sweden, schools are only allowed to say how many places they have free. Each student gets their grades at the end of secondary school and lists the sixth forms they want to go to. The Malmö municipality fills the places in each school, both free and municipal, in order of grade. So if ProCivitas has 300 places, but 1,000 students want to attend it, then the municipality gives the places to the 300 students with the best marks. If on the other hand Kunskapsgymnasiet has 400 places and only 360 students want to go, the municipality will give them all places, even if they have rock-bottom marks.

Per Ledin, Kunskapsskolan’s managing director for Sweden, argues that it is unfair to judge his company’s 32 schools by Kunskapsgymnasiet.

“We have a surplus of capacity in Malmö, so we get people coming into our school who can’t get into other schools,” he said, adding that on average his students get 11 points higher than would be predicted by their socio-economic background.

But when I visited the Malmö school, it was hard to see how. It was so noisy that I thought it must be break time. “Students here, they don’t have to do every task if they can show that they know it,” a teacher said. “English for example, they can learn from the TV and other places.”

Much of the learning at the 32 schools in Sweden run by the company is done alone by students, using an online system, with one-on-one guidance from teachers once a week, interspersed with lectures in classes of up to 60 students.

If students prefer to play cards and chat all day, it’s up to them.

In his study, Vlachos argued that such systems were brought in as much to save costs as to improve education.

Kunskapsgymnasiet’s IT-based teaching system allows it to cut the number of teachers it employs in Malmö to 5.1 teachers per 100 students, compared to an average of 8.2 teachers per 100 students at municipal schools.

“Many municipal schools are horrendously bad,” Vlachos said. “But the difference between the free schools and the municipal schools is that the free schools actually have a profit incentive to reduce quality.”

Kunskapsskolan can point to strong evidence that it works, but according to Daniel Rosen, a Spanish teacher at a state-run sixth-form college in the city of Uppsala, some Kunskapsskolan graduates who come to him have alarming gaps in their knowledge.

“Some do have problems with handling their freedom,” admitted Osterman. “Freedom gives them less fact-based knowledge.”

Peter Connée, who runs ProCivitas, argued that segregation was an unavoidable side-effect of the system. “Fifteen years ago in Sweden, we had segregation based on where you live, now it’s based on ambition and ability.”

Osterman also doesn’t believe it’s necessarily a bad thing. “We are becoming a school for ambitious immigrants,” he said.

But as I was leaving his school, one of his students, Mohammed Mahmoud, put it differently. “This is a school for criminals,” he declared, to laughter. “Nobody’s working in this school, because no one here has any future.”

One man was killed and two more wounded in a shoot-out outside a mosque in central Copenhagen on Tuesday morning.

The attacks came as worshippers left morning prayers on Eid, the festival that ends the Muslim month of fasting.

Police confirmed that the man had died within minutes after he was shot three times in the head, and that a second 50-year-old man was being treated in hospital. A third person, who rushed away in a private car, was shot in the leg.

“The guy who was shot fell down on his back, and then the other guy stood over him and emptied his clip into him,” said Jibran Sarwar, 35, who was leaving the mosque as the shooting began.

“It’s as if someone shot someone at a church mass on Christmas Eve. That’s the equivalent,” he continued. “It’s a day of celebration and now this guy’s parents are siitting at home and he’s in the morgue.”

Anti-Islamic feeling has been strengthening in Denmark ever since the conservative Jyllands-Posten newspaper outraged the Muslim world by publishing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

The support of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, which is calling for re-establishing border controls and closing asylum centres, has become increasingly important for the ruling conservative coalition. The party won 13.9pc of the vote and 25 seats in the last election in 2007.

But Danish Police said that the involvement of racist far-Right groups has been ruled out.

“It was between Pakistani people and no one else. It’s not a hate crime or racism or anything like that,” said Deputy Inspector Lau Thygesen. “There was an argument before the shoot out and then one of them pulled a gun. We are sure that it’s not something that was planned.”

The shoot-out took place as a large crowd stood outside the mosque, waiting for those who had come to pray at nine in the morning to leave so they could attend the 10 o’clock.

The Muslim Cultural Institute is one of the city’s biggest mosques, with a capacity of 1,200 people. It was founded in the late 1970s by Pakistani immigrants.

Zaid Malik, 40, who has recently moved to Copenhagen from Hull, said the killer had been a plump Pakistani wearing the traditional white shalwar kameez. “It’s narcotics. It’s got to with some kind of gang war,” he said. “I heard firing three weeks ago in other areas as well.”

IKEA’s billionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad was a member of the Swedish Nazi party and was such a concern to secret service they opened a file on him, according to a new book.

The 1943 file, revealed in a book published on Wednesday by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink, will revive the long-standing controversy over the far right sympathies of the 85-year-old businessman.

It proves for the first time that Mr Kamprad was an active member of Svensk Socialistisk Samling – the successor to the Swedish Nationalist Socialist Workers Party – even detailing his membership number, 4013.

It quotes letters intercepted from Mr Kamprad, then 17, in which he enthuses about recruiting new members and says that he “misses no opportunity to work for the movement”.

The secret service concluded that, as Mr Kamprad received the party’s youth newspaper, he must have held “some sort of official position within the organisation”.

Ms Åsbrink accused Mr Kamprad of failing to come clean about the full extent of his Nazi past.

“He said in 1998 that he would get everything up on the table and that there would be nothing hidden. Why then didn’t he tell us that he was a member of the worst Nazi party, and that the police found it serious enough to create a file on him?” she said.

Mr Kamprad has long fought to escape the stain of his involvement with the far right New Swedish Movement, revelations of which first surfaced with the publication of the letters of the group’s leader, Per Engdahl, in 1994.

Those letters showed that Mr Kamprad gave money and recruited members, and that Mr Engdahl had been one of a select few invited to Mr Kamprad’s wedding.

Ms Åsbrink said Mr Kamprad’s feelings about Mr Engdahl remained mixed even today. “Per Engdahl was a great man, this I will maintain for as long as I live,” he told her last year in a two-hour interview recorded for her book.

In 1998, Mr Kamprad said he could not remember whether he had been a member of Nordic Youth, Sweden’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth, when faced by further revelations.

But he has never admitted to membership of the more radical Svensk Socialistisk Samling, which was so close to the German Nazi party that it had dropped the Swastika symbol only a few years before Mr Kamprad joined.

Ms Åsbrink’s book, And in Wienerwald the trees remain, details Mr Kamprad’s long friendship with a young Jewish refugee who came to work on his family farm and then played a key role in the team that launched IKEA.

“He came from a background where it was normal to speak badly about Jews, but when he met Otto, they became the closest friends,” she said.

A spokesman for Mr Kamprad downplayed the revelations as “old news”.

“Ingvar Kamprad gave a detailed account back in 1994 about what he describes as his ‘youthful sins’ and the ‘biggest mistake of his life’, apologising and asking for forgiveness from all parties involved. The IKEA he created is based on democratic principles and embraces a multicultural society.”

Vladimir Putin was asked to pressure Roman Abramovich to find a place on the Chelsea youth side for the grandson of Kazakhstan’s President, the boy’s estranged father has claimed.

Rakhat Aliyev, who has been exiled from Kazakhstan since 2007, said that President Nursultan Nazarbayev contacted Putin, who was then Russia’s president, to influence Mr Abramovich to favour Aisultan Nazarbayev.

“I met with Abramovich in London for my son because he was interested in playing football for Chelsea,” Mr Aliyev told the Daily Telegraph.

“Abramovich gave him a trial and he told me, ‘Sorry, tell President Nazarbayev that I can’t interfere with the team’s selection process. I’m like the conductor of an orchestra, and I play with the number one orchestra in world football.’”

When Aisultan returned to Astana, Kazakhtan’s capital, to tell his grandfather the bad news, Mr Aliyev claims he was told that Mr Nazarbayev, through his assistant, had already tried to sway the selection.

“He said, ‘What can I do? I have already made contact through the Kremlin’,” Mr Aliyev claims. “The assistant of the president called Putin’s assistant to organise this.”

Mr Aliyev was exiled to Austria in 2007 after falling out Mr Nazarbayev, compelled to divorce from his wife, and then sentenced in absentia to 40 years in prison, twenty for kidnapping two bankers, and another twenty were for planning an attempted coup.

From exile he published a book, portraying his former father-in-law as a dictator who rules through a combination of fear and corruption.

Aisultan Nazarbayev, now 21, goes under his grandfather’s, rather than his father’s surname.

“That is a complete lie,” he told Daily Telegraph. “I played for Kazakhstan’s Under-17 team in the European championship in Wales and after the match against Wales some agent came and started to speak to my father. And later I appeared in Chelsea. It was very tough to play there, so I had another invite from Portsmouth, and at the end of the day I chose Pompey.”

Dr Aliyev also claimed to have got his son his place at Portsmouth FC, asking Sacha Gaydamak, the club’s owner, to find a place for the boy.

Sacha Gaydamak is the son of Arkady Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli businessman who previously owned a set of mining businesses in Kazakhstan.

Aisultan Nazarbayev said he had played for Chelsea’s Under-16 side for three months and then joined the Portsmouth for a year.

“I can confirm he was here for around six months around 2007,” a spokesman for Portsmouth said.

Chelsea said it had no record of Aisultan Nazarbayev’s selection taking place.

Aisultan Nazarbayev studied at the UK’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in 2009 and is now back in Kazakhstan.

He joined the reserve team for Astana FC, the capital’s lavishly funded football club in March.

“I haven’t played for the first team yet, but I assure you it will be soon,” he said.

Turkmenistan has ambitions to turn a shining city on the Caspian Sea into tourism’s next Dubai. It has a long way to go, says Richard Orange.

I was wondering whether I might be the only guest staying at the new hotel in Awaza, Turkmenistan’s shining resort city on the Caspian Sea, when in walked a group of 14 tourists, most of them British.

“It’s a bit like Dubai,” mused Paul Morgan, the oldest of the group. “And some of the bridges look like bridges in London, with Victorian-type lanterns.”

The group had just spent the afternoon drifting on a boat up the five-mile-long ornamental canal that cuts the resort off from the desert scrub behind.

The eight high-rise, marble-clad hotels were built at a cost of £884 million on the orders of Turkmenistan’s eccentric and all-controlling president, Gurbanguly Berdimukhamedov – otherwise known as “The Protector”. And they are just the first to go up in what may be the most ill-conceived resort ever built.

While you rarely actually taste the petroleum tang from the nearby refinery, it surely offsets the health benefits of the iodine-enriched seawater. Though the sea is something that the hotel staff, ever loyal to the schemes of their president, continually extol, swimming is tricky: even in June, the Caspian waters are cold.

Other drawbacks? Awaza’s spanking new “international” airport only takes domestic flights; getting a visa is a feat; taps deliver rust-coloured water – and then there’s the small matter that this former Soviet republic is run by one of the world’s most closed and repressive regimes.

So what on Earth would bring people here?

Simon Cockerell, the organiser of the tour taken by the Britons I ran into, said visitors are drawn by the sheer weirdness of the place.

“It’s ornate to the point of kitsch,” Morgan said, pointing to the gold leaf and marble that is the dominant decorative style.

Other oddities include empty Paris-style bateau-mouche cruisers, a concrete yacht, spas offering treatments with powerful magnets and a riverside restaurant reserved solely for the president.

“There are a lot of similarities between the dictatorships of Kim Jong-il in North Korea and the one here – the marble, the long avenues,” said Martin Gordon, another tour member.

Despite the low occupancy rates at existing hotels, there are plans to build a further 15, plus an aqua park and two Dubai-style artificial islands.

But even at a bargain $25 (£15.20) a night, sun seekers from Britain, or even from nearby Russia or Ukraine, will probably pass.

“They have this grand vision, but there’s a bit of a gap,” said Gordon. “They need to make a bit more of an effort with the beach if they’re going to get anywhere.

“I was about to dive in and saw this great big submerged metal thing just below the surface.”

Sting has backed out of a concert in Kazakhstan to mark the President’s birthday, in protest at a government “crackdown” on striking oil workers.

A statement on the former Police frontman’s website said the decision had been made on the advice of the international rights group Amnesty International, who had warned that the concert would be “an endorsement of the presidents’ administration,” and would “go against everything he has stood for, while supporting Amnesty”.

The last minute decision to add the Astana date to the Synchronicity World Tour had come as a surprise when it was announced in May, given the hypocrisy charges Sting had faced after he played at a fashion event in nearby Uzbekistan only two years before.

While President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s rule is relatively benign compared to that of the highly repressive Uzbek regime, he has nonetheless maintained a tight grip on his country since before the fall of the Soviet Union.

Workers have been striking for more than 40 days in Kazakhstan’s oil-rich Western region, in what has been a rare challenge to the country’s government. Last week Kazmunaigas EP, the London-listed subsidiary the state oil company fired 250 employees for breaching their contract terms.

“Hunger strikes, imprisoned workers and tens of thousands on strike represents a virtual picket line which I have no intention of crossing,” said Sting.

Sting’s decision is not only a slight to the Kazakh president, it will also disappoint the citizens of the Kazakh capital, some of whom paid as much as £400 for tickets to the show.

The three days running up to the president’s birthday on July 6 were made a national holiday three years ago. Officially the holiday is known as “Astana Day” and celebrates the shifting of the country’s capital to Astana.

Last year, Mr Nazarbayev’s 70th Birthday, the blind Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli sung Nessun Dorma as the President looked on from a raised dais.

Royal Dutch Shell and its partners are to ask the Kazakh government for an extension to the 2013 deadline for the first oil from their troubled Kashagan field.

Kazakh oil minister Sauat Mynbayev has repeatedly threatened the consortium of oil companies with heavy financial penalties if it misses the 2013 final deadline.

The partners, including Shell, Total, ExxonMobil, Eni and Kazakh state oil company KMG, have missed start dates beginning as far back as 2005.

A last-ditch plan to meet the 2013 deadline involved pumping at least 50,000 barrels per day of oil directly onshore, bypassing an unfinished processing plant on an artificial island.

However, at an acrimonious meeting a fortnight ago, the partners rejected this option. The consortium now has no choice but to ask the oil ministry for an extension, according to a source at an oil services company in Atyrau.

“Our people went to a workshop 10 days ago, and were told that the partners had rejected the ‘early oil’ concept because it was not sufficiently worked out, and so they now had a brief to go back and ask for an extension to their 2013 deadline,” he said.

A spokesman for the North Caspian Operating Company (NCOC), which operates the project, said the consortium had not altered its plans to hit the 2013 target. “We are still working towards the target of the end of 2012 and a lot of effort is going into meeting that date,” he said.

When the Caspian field was found in 2000, it was the largest oil discovery in 30 years, with reserves of 9bn to 13bn barrels of oil.

But it has been dogged by technical difficulties, pushing total development costs as high as to $136bn. The delay will inevitably increase friction with Kazakhstan, complicating the group’s struggle to win approval for a second phase of the development.

A proposed law banning children from mosques in Tajikistan, could be “disastrous”, the world’s leading conflict prevention group has said, arguing it will fuel the growing security threat from a new generation of Islamic militants.

The new law “on Parental Responsibility”. which was approved by the lower house of the Tajik parliament last month, bans under-18-year-olds from attending prayers in mosques, and may also allow the authorities to stop parents giving Arabic names to their children.

The law is already sparking outrage in the country, with Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda, a leading religious leader, last week describing it as “openly against the will of God”.

“Right now the government’s approach to handling any issues connected to Islam is repression, rather than any attempt at dialogue, and this is obviously going to be disastrous,” said Paul Quinn-Judge, project director for Central Asia at International Crisis Group.

“I have a very strong gut feeling that the secular side of Tajik society is shrinking quite radically. The government cannot keep using the law, using pressure, and using restrictions to handle the islamicisation of its society.”

In a report on Tajikistan last month, the group warned the Tajik government to pull back anti-Islamic measures implemented last year, which included repatriating more than a thousand students from religious schools overseas, forcibly closing hundreds of mosques, threatening long jail sentences for setting up “illegal” religious schools, and even banning a footballer who wore an Islamic beard.

“It is hard to imagine a series of government measures which, taken together, would be better designed to provoke a groundswell of outrage,” the report concluded.

Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic, is vulnerable both to domestic Islamic extremism, and to organisations based across the long, poorly policed border with Afghanistan, such as the al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

The country was rocked by a long and bloody civil war in the early 1990s, which pitted forces loyal to President Emomalii Rahmon against a coalition of Islamic groups and liberal reformists.

International Crisis Group cautioned president Rahmon against believing that the scars of the war would forever prevent the Islamic opposition from taking up arms.

“A new generation of guerrillas is emerging, both within Tajikistan and in the IMU. They are mostly men in their twenties with little memory of the Tajik civil war,” the report concluded.

Grigori Marchenko, who has pulled out of the race to run the IMF, was a reluctant contender who first he heard of his candidacy by text message on the day it was agreed at a meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the group of former Soviet countries.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph before he announced he was pulling out of the leadership race late on Friday, Mr Marchenko said he could see the logic of fielding a candidate from Kazakhstan, a former Soviet country sandwiched between three out of the four BRIC nations.

“If you got Russia, China and India on your side, then you could get also Brazil and Africa, and then you could promote…myself as a project… for the rest of the emerging markets, and then you, theoretically, would have a chance,” he said.

This focus on geopolitics underplayed his personal qualifications to be a candidate. Mr Marchenko, a rangy, energetic economist, with an almost professorial manner, is one of the developing world’s most outstanding central bankers.

However he stressed that talent has little bearing on this race.

“We would all like it to be based on merit, irrespective of the country where the candidates are coming from. But de facto it’s very much determined by where you were born and not by how good you are. It’s about politics and deal-making.

His campaign was finished almost as soon as it began, he believed.

“Two things happened: one, it’s more or less clear there’s an agreement on Christine Lagarde [France's finance minister], and on the other hand it’s quite clear that the emerging markets can’t unite on a candidate… so this whole process becomes a little idealistic.”

It was very unlikely that he would receive a nomination on Friday, he argued, particularly as the former Soviet block pushing for him are tied to the Swiss, Belgian, and Dutch voting constituencies, who might vote for Ms Lagarde anyway.

He argues that the developing world had allowed itself to be outmaneuvered by the G8 countries, who he suspects had “a done deal” supporting Ms Lagarde, even before Dominique Strass-Kahn’s sudden resignation.

“In 2007, quite a few representatives of European countries, they were saying, ‘this is the last time a European is going to run’. Now they’re saying, ‘next time you’ll get it, but this time we need a European candidate’. We need to prepare better.”

Developing nations should already be building a united front ahead of Ms Lagarde’s eventual retirement, he believes, or perhaps they should push to nominate the head of the World Bank instead.

“It’s clear that this post-colonial arrangement, where the IMF is run by a European, and the World Bank is run by an American should be changed, but how? Maybe its better to have someone from developing countries managing the World Bank, and have a CEO of the IMF who’s either American, or European or Japanese.”

Mr Marchenko believes the importance of who runs the organisation has anyway been exaggerated.

“This whole issue is a bit overblown. The IMF is a strong organisation, maybe not as ideological as it was in the 1990s, but still strong. So the whole idea that the new CEO would change this organisation profoundly is simply wrong.”

“And also, the more important issues, and more systemic issues, are decided by the board of directors, which is represented by developed countries.”

He dismissed the idea that the European debt crisis favours a European candidate.

“The US economy is still not in great shape; the Japanese economy is also still recovering, and now it’s complicated by the problems of the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima plant; developing countries have problems of their own: so to narrow the problems of the IMF, and say the IMF is now required only to settle the problems of Europe, that would be completely wrong.”

“Who’s the best person to tackle these problems now? Maybe someone with a lot of experience of the Latin American crisis in the 1990s, somebody with a lot of experience in developing countries which has relevance to the problems facing Europe right now.”

At any rate, Mr Marchenko believes that France and Germany have enough economic strength to hold the Europe together, even without the IMF.

“Germany and France together I think are able to counter the problems of several small peripheral countries, and they’ve been growing quite nicely, so I believe that Europe can handle their issues.”

The European Union has grown “too fast and too far,” and needs to better coordinate fiscal policy if it is to thrive.

“We still remember the Soviet Union times – running 15 republics was quite difficult, because they have diverging interests. And you have 27 countries.”

“I think Greece should not have been included in the Eurozone,” he adds, although he believes pushing any countries out now would cause more problems than it solved.

“When the Soviet Union broke up it caused a very big economic crisis, so kicking someone out has a lot of negative and unintended consequences. It’s much better to be erring on the conservative side while letting people in … throwing someone out of the club will be very painful, not only for the person, but for the rest of the club.”