Increase in minority shareholders

The supervisory board of Sberbank will include all representatives of non-state shareholders

The annual meeting of Sberbank shareholders will today approve the new composition of its supervisory board. There will be fewer top managers, but a third representative of minority shareholders will appear. The honorary chairman of the FGD, Boris Fedorov, and the head of the Industrial Investors group, Sergei Generalov, who are already working in this capacity, will be joined by the chairman of the board of directors of OJSC Bashkhim and the former general director of the investment company Sovlink, Dmitry Pyatkin.

Of the representatives of minority shareholders, in recent years only Boris Fedorov has consistently retained a seat on the board of Sberbank (the largest shareholder is the Central Bank with a share of about 60%) (now clients of the United Financial Group, which he founded, control about 3% of Sberbank shares). Before last year’s shareholders’ meeting, Vadim Kleiner, a representative of Hermitage Capital Management, was on the board with him; he harshly criticized the top management and even received a lawsuit from Sberbank to protect his business reputation. Mr. Generalov became director of the state bank last year (then Mr. Kleiner failed), and at the same time the former head of the president's economic department, Anton Danilov-Danilyan, was elected to the board. The latter could be considered an independent director, but the main shareholder, the Central Bank, voted for his candidacy. This year he was not included in the list of candidates, but Dmitry Pyatkin, nominated by a group of minority shareholders, was included in it (the list) for the first time.

Thus, this year the minority shareholders did not nominate many candidates, but the uniqueness of the situation is that they all have a 100 percent chance of taking one of the 17 seats on the council. The fact is that, according to the charter of Sberbank, the number of state representatives in this body should not exceed 11 people, and management this year nominated only three candidates (head of the bank Andrey Kazmin, first deputy chairman of the board Alla Aleshkina and deputy chairman Bella Zlatkis). Until today, the head of the Central Black Earth Bank of Sberbank, Alexander Solovyov, and the director of the internal control department, Andrei Manoilo, were also represented on the board of the state bank. “All independent candidates will be able to join the council,” notes Sergei Generalov. The largest minority shareholders, in particular the JP Morgan Fleming and NCH Advisors funds, he hopes, will divide their votes between the candidates and will not support one.

Meanwhile, investors, apparently, are waiting in vain for Sberbank to traditionally announce its results under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for the year before the shareholders meeting. One of the bankers says that in the middle of the week the IFRS statements had not yet been endorsed by Mr. Kazmin, but today Mr. Kazmin may name key indicators for shareholders. However, Sergei Generalov says that the results according to IFRS will most likely appear later: “They have not been shown to us (members of the supervisory board - Ed. ) yet."

Yuri VERETENNIKOV, Nikolai GORELOV