| Headline: People Source: Euromoney Date: December 2000 Author: Philip Eade Wanda Rapaczynski President and CEO, Agora When in 1992 Wanda Rapaczynski announced that she was quitting her job as a senior executive at Citibank in New York to help run Poland’s first independent newspaper, her former Citibank colleagues might have assumed that she simply wanted to do her bit to help her country recover from decades of communism and martial law. Few would have predicted that the move would be a good one financially. What has happened since represents one of the most staggering business success stories in the former Soviet bloc. The newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Gazette) is now the flagship of media giant Agora, which has diversified into radio, pay-TV and most recently the internet, and has a market capitalization of $1 billion (when the shares were at their height earlier this year, it was worth $2 billion). Thanks to the staff shareholding plan devised by Rapaczynski and her colleagues Helena Luczywo (the editorial director) and Piotr Niemczycki, there are now reckoned to be some 400-dollar millionaires on the Agora payroll. (Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, historian Adam Michnik, refused to buy his allotment of shares, turning down the opportunity to become a millionaire several times over). |