Today's *Vedomosti* writes that participants in the "people's IPOs" have been shafted again. With a brief comment from me.
Neither Share Prices nor DividendsBecause of the crisis, the state will most likely not extract money from state-owned companies in the form of 2008 dividends. That means participants in the "people's IPOs"—buyers of shares in Sberbank, VTB, and Rosneft—will receive no dividends. Alexei Navalny, a minority shareholder in Gazprom and Rosneft, is outraged by the impending decision: the issue is not even the dividends, "which basically don't exist anyway," but the way the question is being framed. "Kudrin would do better to take a cue from [U.S. President Barack] Obama, who is urging companies to save on top managers' salaries and bonuses," Navalny concludes. No one expects stock market growth in 2009, and dividends had been protecting the value of many companies from further decline, notes Lev Prikhodko, director of Prosperity Capital Management: they could be viewed as quasi-fixed-income securities. Further This article is in the blogs[?]