Igor Shuvalov's statement that officials sitting on the boards of directors of state-owned companies should give way to non-officials caused considerable enthusiasm. And it allowed commentators to draw a conclusion about the forthcoming almost revolution in the system of state property management. hurry up
First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said that "in the near future" there will be a rotation in companies owned by the state, and boards of directors will be created that will act according to the rules of private companies, and that "we have serious plans for improving corporate governance in state corporations, so that they act absolutely openly.” Optimists immediately saw in these words signs of the coming decline in the role of the state in the economy.
For whom the law is not written
According to official statistics, today one third of the total employed population of the country works at state enterprises and state institutions, and the budget of these structures accounts for 51% of investments in fixed assets. Those who in recent years have been strenuously inflating the role of state structures, apparently, know quite well the psychology of the population. Every time a Russian citizen hears the word “state”, he somehow calms down.
This means that everything is under reliable control, and in general, since something is “state”, it means that it is mine to some extent. It is not for nothing that some firms lure the consumer with the promise of “state prices”. But in relation to state-owned companies, and especially to state corporations, the word "state" serves only for disguise.
State in these structures - property, resources and expenses. But it’s more difficult with income: they don’t share it with the state, except that they pay taxes. In any case, it is not possible to find a line in the section “Federal budget revenues” that would indicate the profit of state-owned companies.
Meanwhile, only the government knows how many state-owned companies there are in the country. The main ones: RAO UES, liquidated from July 1, Gazprom, Rosneft, Transnefteprodukt, Techsnabexport, Svyazinvest, Sovcomflot, Aeroflot, Sheremetyevo, Almaz-Antey, RSC Energia ”, VTB ... True, only a few have 100% state participation: Russian Railways, Transneft, TVEL (a company that produces 17% of nuclear fuel in the world), Zarubezhneft and some military-industrial complex enterprises. Apparently, the modernization of boards of directors will begin with them.
There are a great many officials on the boards of directors of state-owned companies (see marginal note). First and simply vice-premiers, ministers, heads of departments... The list of candidates put forward to these boards of directors is regularly approved by the government by separate decrees. And I immediately want to ask: has the government read the constitutional law about itself? What about its article 11, where it is written in black and white that members of the government “are prohibited from participating in the management of an economic entity, regardless of its organizational and legal form”? And there are no exceptions. Maybe state-owned companies are not business entities? Or is the board of directors not a governing body?
As for officials of a lower rank, they are also prohibited by the law on the civil service from participating “on a paid basis in the activities of the management bodies of commercial organizations, except in cases established by federal law.”
So the government is breaking the law? By proposing to withdraw officials from the boards of directors of state-owned companies and replace them with "professionals", Igor Shuvalov is only proposing to comply with the law?
Devotees Wanted
Meanwhile, according to Igor Yurgens, the first vice-president of the Renaissance Capital group, there are simply not enough trained independent directors in the country. Yurgens counted 150-200 people at the most, despite the fact that two orders of magnitude more are required. However, it's not just about quantity. Skeptics ask themselves: what will change from the fact that some people are replaced by others who are just as loyal to the authorities? What difference does it make whether First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, Minister of Industry Viktor Khristenko and the head of the Ministry of Economic Development Elvira Nabiullina will sit on the future board of directors of Gazprom, elected on June 27, or will other “professionals” sent by Vladimir Putin and personally devoted to him sit there? Perhaps, "Gazprom" from this will become more "transparent"? Maybe his top managers, exhausted from backbreaking work to turn off gas to Ukraine and PR for the construction of a skyscraper in St. Petersburg, will be paid less than they are today?
What will change if the board of directors of Rosneft no longer includes Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin and head of the presidential administration Sergei Naryshkin? Or will Rosneft, which has taken on huge loans to buy Yukos assets and is unable to repay them, stop demanding that the state help it financially by purchasing the bonds issued by the company? Or will Russian Railways, whose board of directors will remove Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, Minister of Transport Igor Levitin and Shuvalov himself, begin to "tear" less for tickets from passengers?
When you start dealing with state corporations, it becomes even sadder. Many experts call these structures, to which the state gave its property and money once and for all, 1 extremely harmful to the economy and solving only one problem: to provide friends and associates of Vladimir Putin with control over the gigantic resources irretrievably withdrawn from state assets.
State Duma Chairman Boris Gryzlov is usually loyal and cautious, but he somehow took courage and demanded that the state corporations be placed under the control of parliament, saying that the money "was not transferred to them in order to scroll through them in banks." What is true is true: public funds are put on deposits, and "dripping" interest can be deducted to top managers. However, according to the laws adopted by the parliament, state corporations are not subject to state financial control, and there is no way to find out how they spend money. Unless, of course, they themselves will not tell. But something tells me that they will be reserved in this matter...
The boards of directors of companies with state participation include or are planned to be elected:
First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, Minister of Industry Viktor Khristenko, Minister of Economic Development Elvira Nabiullina (Gazprom); Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, Minister of Transport Igor Levitin, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Deputy Minister of Industry Andrei Dementiev, Director of the Department of the Ministry of Finance Vladimir Belov, Deputy Minister of Transport Alexander Misharin, Deputy Minister of Economic Development Anna Popova (Russian Railways); Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, head of the presidential administration Sergei Naryshkin (Rosneft); Viktor Khristenko, Presidential Aide Arkady Dvorkovich, Andrey Dementyev, Head of the Federal Energy Agency Dmitry Akhanov, Deputy Head of the Federal Property Management Agency Yury Medvedev (Transneft); Igor Shuvalov, Director of the FSB Alexander Bortnikov, Sergei Naryshkin, Alexander Misharin, Yuri Medvedev, Director of the Department of the Ministry of Transport Alexander Tikhonov, Director of the Department of the Ministry of Economic Development Alexei Sokolov (Sovcomflot); Deputy Minister of Finance Dmitry Pankin, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Government of the Russian Federation Kirill Androsov, Deputy Head of the Federal Property Management Agency Gleb Nikitin, Director of the Department of the Ministry of Industry Vladimir Salamatov (Zarubezhneft).
Bad advice. Directors • New Times • RIMA — Russian Independent Media Archive
