| Headline: Sibneft and the trend towards transparency Source: Euromoney Date: April 2001 Evgeny Shvidler, president of Russia’s sixth largest oil company Sibneft, talks here to Euromoney about corporate governance and strategy. Shvidler was educated in the US and worked at Deloitte and Touche in New York in the international tax group. He returned to Russia to be finance director of Runicom, an oil trading company that is one of Sibneft’s owners. In 1998 he became president and CEO of Sibneft. Following the privatisation of the mid-90s, Sibneft was part owned by oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Although Berezovsky says that he no longer owns any part of the company, Roman Abramovich, another oligarch and now governor of the Chukotka region, is still a shareholder. Sibneft is criticised for its opaque ownership. Why don’t you want to say who your owners are? There will never be a full disclosure of the owners of the company. There is a consensus that it is not in their interests – if the share price is penalized for their not disclosing their names then that is their business. In this respect western companies are not too much different. |