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2003-04-14
On April 10, 2003 The Institute of Corporate Law and Corporate Governance presented an updated rating list of 25 major Russian companies judged for the quality of their corporate governance practices in the IV quarter of the 2002.
“Slavneft” privatization resulted in lowering the Corporate Governance Rating of “Slavneft-Megionneftegaz”
The updated Corporate Governance Rating of Russian Companies (CORE-Rating) was presented by the Institute of Corporate Law and Corporate Governance on April 10, 2003. The Rating reflects the results of a survey of the quality of corporate governance in 25 Russian companies in Q4, 2002.
The list of leaders and outsiders of the new CORE-Rating in Q4 did not see much change: “VympelCom” is again on top of the list in the rating table, while the lowest line is occupied by OAO “Rosneft-Purneftegaz”.
Compared to Q3 2002 the following companies have significantly improved its score and, therefore, moved up in the rating table: OAO “Lenenergo”, OAO “Tyumen Oil Company” and OAO “MGTS”. These companies timely provided all documents requested by the Institute as a shareholder. The analysis of these documents did not discover any violations of information disclosure requirements.
Companies “LUKOIL” and “Slavneft-Megionneftegaz” had a significant deterioration of their ratings. “LUKOIL” failed to provide a single document requested by the Institute as a shareholder during the whole quarter. As a consequence of such poor information disclosure, the company moved down the list from the 7th place to the 15th.
Lowering of the rating of OAO “Slavneft-Megionneftegaz” is first of all related to the privatization of the parent company, GNK “Slavneft” in Q4 2002. The Institute’s experts gave these events a dual evaluation. On one hand, after the privatization of “Slavneft” the risk associated with the Government’s influence reduced significantly. However, as the plans of the new owners are not yet publicly disclosed, the risks related to the company restructuring grow dramatically. At the same time as the new owners came in, the disclosure of information about material facts also deteriorated, which creates additional risks for shareholders.
The analysis of the overall dynamics of corporate governance in Russian companies in 2002 showed that gradual improvement of corporate governance was demonstrated by “GMK “Norilsk Nickel”, “Rostelecom”, “AEROFLOT”, “Surgutneftegaz” and “GAZ”. OAO “Severstal”, OAO “Kuzbassenergo” and RAO “UES of Russia”, on the contrary, showed negative corporate governance trends in 2002.
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