Two arbitration court hearings are taking place today. The first: Navalny v. Transneft. The second: Navalny v. Rosneft.
Bloggers may find the Transneft case interesting. Because bloggers love organizing and supporting highly commendable campaigns like “help a child, raise such-and-such amount of money.” This is always the most common kind of top post in Yandex Blog Search. Almost every time, the internet public manages to raise the amount needed for surgery or treatment. Charity is a wonderful thing. But few people know that the biggest philanthropist in Russia is not the foundations created by Nosik, Parker, or even Fridman. The biggest philanthropist in Russia is Transneft. Last year, it spent 7,193,000,000 rubles on charity. Written out: seven billion one hundred ninety-three million rubles. Three hundred million U.S. dollars. That is a very generous donation, especially considering that in the same year Transneft spent only six billion rubles on repairing and maintaining all of its oil pipelines. In other words, charity is more important to Transneft than pipelines, even though pipelines are Transneft’s main and only job. If we look at the charity posts by dolboeb and mrparker (the main initiators of online charity campaigns), we will see that the sums needed for a specific child are usually not all that large. 50,000 to 100,000 rubles. Let us assume that, on average, helping a sick child costs 100,000 rubles ($4,200). Obviously that is a rough average, but still. Divide 7,193 million rubles by 100,000 rubles and you get 71,930 people. So if Transneft were funding, say, the foundations run by Kononenko and Nosik, those foundations could help 72,000 children a year. Now for the question: what worthy causes is Transneft—a company whose shares, I remind you, are 100% state-owned—actually giving such colossal sums to? There is no answer. And as a Transneft shareholder, I am forced to extract that answer through the arbitration court. I have asked many people involved in charity about Transneft. BUT NOT ONCE HAVE I MET A SINGLE PERSON WHO KNEW THE FATE OF EVEN A SMALL PART OF TRANSNEFT’S CHARITABLE MONEY. Maybe such people exist. In fact, they probably do. I am looking for them. So far, unsuccessfully. For several months now I have been corresponding with Transneft, asking the same question over and over: please tell me which specific organizations received the company’s charitable assistance? At first they wrote things like, “the company provides open and transparent charitable assistance to various organizations. Thank you for your inquiry.” Then they started snapping back, basically saying it was none of my business whom they help. Now that I have gone to court, Transneft says this is confidential information. Can a state-owned company secretly allocate three hundred million dollars to charity? I do not think so. Transneft, the Russian government, the Ministry of Energy, and everyone else I have contacted seem to think it can. Today the Moscow Arbitration Court will give an answer to that question. Update: yell**ow_reporter com**ments: Just for reference: for example, the Russian Aid Foundation, the country’s largest charitable fundraiser, runs the biggest collections in the country. In 2007, more than 7,500 readers of Kommersant and about 400 companies raised 160 **million rubles ($6.4 million) — “**Whatever You Can Spare” (an excellent piece about fundraisers in charitable organizations). http://yellow-reporter.livejournal.com/817230.html?mode=reply So Transneft spent 45 (forty-five!) times more on charity in 2007 than the Russian Aid Foundation. But everyone interested in charity knows about the Russian Aid Foundation’s work, while no one knows anything about Transneft’s charity. Update 2: Some people are saying I made up all these figures and that Transneft’s charity spending is not listed anywhere. For the doubters, here is the algorithm: Click the link http[://www.transneft.ru/Finance/Default.asp?LANG=RU ]({{URL_5}})Click on CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS PREPARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL REPORTING STANDARDS (IFRS) FOR THE YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2007 a Word file opens. go to page 30 look carefully at item 17. There is a line called “Charitable expenses.” Both 2007 and 2006 are there. be stunned, then write an angry letter to Transneft and the Prosecutor’s Office.