Oleg Vyugin Covers Up Theft at Transneft
On November 24, preliminary hearings were held at the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow in a lawsuit brought by minority shareholder Alexei Navalny against Oleg Vyugin, a member of the Board of Directors of OAO AK Transneft and an independent director Oleg Vyugin. A. Navalny submitted a request for information concerning Transneft’s charitable activities and asked that the Board of Directors consider publishing all information related to them. As is well known, over the past two years Transneft has spent more than half a billion dollars on “charitable purposes,” yet it categorically refuses to name the recipients of these generous donations. Oleg Vyugin himself did not appear in court. However, he made his position clear by sending no fewer than three lawyers to the hearing. Their task was to convince the court that “independent director” O. Vyugin has the right to ignore requests from the company’s minority shareholders. “Oleg Vyugin’s position is baffling. He is a well-known man with a good reputation. He was elected as an independent director of the company and, obviously, should stand for transparency in the company’s operations and for fighting theft within it. That is precisely why I turned to him, expecting support for my lawful demands. However, Vyugin prefers to sacrifice his reputation in order to cover up the dubious dealings going on at Transneft,” Alexei Navalny said. “We have serious grounds to believe that, under the cover of charitable activity, theft on an especially large scale has been taking place and continues to take place at the company. I and other minority shareholders of Transneft will seek to ensure that this ‘charity’ case leads to criminal proceedings. It is regrettable that Vyugin has ended up on the other side of the barricades. One can only hope that he himself is not personally involved in these schemes,” A. Navalny emphasized. Let us recall that, according to the “Code of the Independent Director,” an independent director “acts on behalf of all shareholders of the company and, consequently, within the scope of his competence, protects the rights and lawful interests of all shareholders of the company,” and also “seeks to ensure that shareholders receive the information about the company that they need.” The full text of the code is available at: http://www.nand.ru/ob-assotsiatsii/kodeks-nezavisimogo-direktora.html That’s that. The next hearing is on December 25. I would add that not long ago Oleg Vyugin was awarded a Gold Diploma "For Personal Contribution to Increasing the Transparency of the Russian Stock Market.**** How this diploma can be reconciled with Vyugin’s support for Transneft’s secret charity is unclear. But I have decided for myself that from now on all letters to Vyugin (and there clearly will be more) will be addressed as follows: To* Oleg Vyacheslavovich Vyugin, independent member of the Board of Directors of OAO AK Transneft, recipient of the award “For Personal Contribution to Increasing the Transparency of the Stock Market,” holder of the Gold Diploma.*