Vedomosti is once again looking into its favorite subject today: who owns Surgutneftegas. To me, both as a shareholder in the company and simply as a citizen of the Russian Federation, this sounds like utter nonsense. It is the country’s fourth-largest oil company. And nobody knows who owns it. So apparently we’ve already gotten up off our knees (a common Russian expression for national resurgence). We got up. Straightened our backs. Drew ourselves up. Gave the Georgians a kicking. We decided to turn Moscow into an international financial center. And yet we still don’t know who owns the oil companies. Something is very strange here. When I brought this up to Sechin during a break at a Rosneft shareholders’ meeting (Vedomosti mentions this exact moment), he began, quite sincerely, explaining that everything was perfectly fine with Surgut. It belongs to itself and to its employees. What is interesting is that all the former and current “Surgut people” I’ve managed to talk to about this also consider this, to put it mildly, rather crooked ownership structure for one of the giants of the Russian economy to be perfectly normal. Maybe there’s something wrong with me? I do not think this looks normal:
And of course, when a company owns itself, then in practice it belongs to the CEO. Or to whoever stands behind him. And looming there is the cheerful face of Gennady Timchenko from my favorite company, Gunvor. Which does not exactly fill me with enthusiasm. That said, Vladimir Bogdanov himself seems to me the most likable, on a human level, of all the “oil barons.” By the way, studying the table of possible owners compiled by Vedomosti reveals an amusing detail. At SNGZ, discrimination against women in senior appointments has been completely defeated. In fact, quite the opposite. Of the 11 people heading the entities that own the company, ten are women!