I just got back from a Standard & Poor's event. They presented their report and ranking, **Study of Information Transparency of Russian Companies in 2008 **My beloved Rosneft came in second. The only company rated more transparent was CTC Media. But that’s not the main point. They ranked the 90 largest companies in Russia. In the handout they distributed, there was only the top ten, and accordingly the whole report was written in the spirit of, "and this company also made major progress." So I raised my hand and asked the presenter: the leaders are clear enough, tell us about the laggards. I don’t agree with Rosneft being near the top, and I’d at least like to understand what it’s being compared against. The presenter replied: we do not disclose positions 11 through 90. So S&P made its transparency ranking opaque)))) People started grumbling quietly, and the authors of the ranking were forced to explain their decision. Basically: we chose not to do that so as not to create additional negativity in a falling market. Sounds strange. S&P’s next step, then, should be to stop downgrading companies’ credit ratings altogether—why spread that kind of negativity? Why make a transparency ranking at all? By definition, a ranking implies leaders and laggards. That’s the whole point of a ranking. Another comic absurdity: they also made a transparency ranking by sector of the economy. The "Oil and Gas" category got very strong transparency scores. It came in third, behind only "Communications" and something else. It is separately noted that "oil and gas" here means the ten largest companies by market capitalization. I asked: did Gazprom and Surgutneftegaz make the list? And what places did they get? They answered: yes, they did, but we won’t say what places. Which raises the question: how could "oil and gas" as a sector get a strong transparency score if 30% of the sector’s market capitalization here comes from Gazprom and Surgut—two utterly out-of-control companies. On a 100-point openness scale, I’d give Gazprom a 20 and Surgut a 0. In the hallway, a guy who had worked on the ranking basically agreed with me, but said that yes, Surgut is a complete disaster, while Gazprom is not quite that hopeless, and that they had calculated everything correctly. In any case, there’s no way to verify it—the calculation methodology "is not disclosed and is the property of S&P."