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ПУБЛИКАЦИИ: ТЕКУЩИЕ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ В ЭКОНОМИКЕ

A Mentality Change for Russian Executives

Sabrina Tavernise New York Times Service, 21.08.2001

MOSCOW Mikhail Khodorkovsky says he has seen the light.

At the headquarters of AO Yukos Oil Co., Mr. Khodorkovsky, its chairman, sat recently under a sign saying "Honesty, Openness, Responsibility" to discuss the company's latest financial results with an air of friendly candor.

For Mr. Khodorkovsky, by some estimates the richest man in Russia - and a man who just two years earlier orchestrated a series of corporate abuses of minority shareholders unparalleled in the short history of modern Russian capitalism - it was quite a performance.

"There has been a change in mentality," Mr. Khodorkovsky said. "People now understand that transparency, good relations with investors and honest behavior in the market in the short term are to your advantage."

That is especially true if you already have firm control of an empire the size of Mr. Khodorkovsky's: He is one of Russia's leading oligarchs, the men who seized the opportunity, in the chaos of Russia's early post-Communist days, to amass fortunes at little cost through cozy relationships with the state.

There is a saying in Russian that the country has a very unpredictable past, and so it is with Mr. Khodorkovsky.

He is now working to right - and rewrite - some past wrongs. He has repaid Russian depositors who lost their savings when AO Bank Menatep, which he ran, collapsed in 1998. His image-burnishing efforts have gone as far as hiring APCO, a prominent public relations firm based in Washington.

The election of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia seemed to signal an end to the open season on grabbing state property, and the most successful grabbers are now charting different courses.

Some wanted to stay on the national political stage, such as Vladimir Gusinsky, a media baron, and Boris Berezovsky, a powerful Kremlin figure under former President Boris Yeltsin; they have been driven out of Russia altogether. Another decamped to the provinces: Roman Abramovich, an oil tycoon, has become governor of Chukotka in the Far East, where he can avoid encountering rivals while he works to shed his oligarch image.

But all want to preserve what they have gained in the past decade. "Look at most of our oligarchs," said Boris Fyodorov, a former finance minister. "Where are they? Making money and not interfering with politics. In Yeltsin's economy, the state was for sale - you could easily control it. Now it's no longer like this."

Mr. Khodorkovsky has concentrated on recasting Yukos to look more like a company that investors can trust. It paid $300 million in dividends for 2000 after years or paying little or nothing, and it released three years' financial results audited to international accounting standards.

Luckily for Mr. Khodorkovsky, markets have short memories: Analysts raved, and the stock price shot up sixfold.

Other Russian companies have made a show of going straight. After drawing criticism for diluting minority shareholders' stakes, RAO Norilsk Nickel, a giant mining concern, and AO Sibneft, another large oil company, have made efforts to repair relations with investors. Sibneft says it will pay 91 percent of last year's net income, or $612 million, in dividends.

The oligarchs have much to live down. Like many of his peers, Mr. Khodorkovsky, now 38, made his first fortune in banking in the early 1990s. When Menatep collapsed in the 1998 financial crisis, a court-appointed manager was unable to gather a complete picture of its finances, in part because a truckful of the bank's records fell into a river near Moscow at an inconvenient moment. Control of the bankrupt bank wound up in the hands of two Menatep-linked banks.

Mr. Khodorkovsky acknowledges that his methods may have been "too tough from the Western point of view." But under Russian law, he said, it was all legal and a fair fight. All the transferred assets are back where they started, he said, and in any case, times have changed, and so has Yukos.

"It's less profitable to swindle," said Julia Latynina, a business commentator on the television network ORT. In the mad scramble of the mid-1990s, fiduciary niceties got short shrift, and the oligarchs "were willing to do anything to get as much property as possible," she said. "They cheated in order to get it. But now they own it and are trying to hang onto it."

Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

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