Less state. They want to replace its representatives with professional managers on the boards of directors of the largest state-owned companies. Will the latter work more efficiently from this?
Firstly, independent directors representing the state under contract have been serving on the boards of directors of large companies for a long time, and this has not brought any breakthroughs in terms of transparency. For example, former ministers Farit Gazizullin and Igor Yusufov have been working on the board of directors of Gazprom for four years, representing the state under an agreement with the Federal Property Management Agency, and during this time they did not show themselves at all, dutifully voting in accordance with the directives issued to them. There is no sense from such "representatives" - with the same success you can plant a bucket of potatoes on the board of directors. However, for the “liberated directors” themselves, there may be some sense - for example, the son of the former Energy Minister Igor Yusufov headed the Moscow office of Nord Stream AG, the future operator of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
People who are not civil servants are also present in other state-owned companies: for example, the board of directors of RAO UES includes the former head of the presidential administration Alexander Voloshin and ex-Minister for Antimonopoly Policy Ilya Yuzhanov, Rosneft - ex-Deputy Minister of Industry and Energy Andrey Reus , Russian Railways - head of VTB Andrey Kostin. All of them work under the contract with the state.
Between bad and very bad
The debate about who will best represent the state as a shareholder - official officials or their hired representatives, is probably eternal, both options have pluses and minuses. Both are equally prone to corruption. Yes, hired directors have more time for a professional approach to business (officials are forced to be distracted by a lot of other things), but ministers and their deputies, whose status does not depend on an agreement with the Federal Property Management Agency, have the opportunity to more resolutely defend the objective interests of the state. For example, the main fighter for the transparency and efficiency of Gazprom on the board of directors of the company was ex-Minister German Gref, and not at all hired freelancers Gazizullin and Yusufov.
At one time, the state-owned stake in Gazprom, under an agreement with the state, was generally single-handedly managed by the former head of the company Rem Vyakhirev - as a result, then this stake almost slipped out of the hands of the state.
Independent directors - financiers, experts - already some time ago appeared on the boards of directors of state-owned companies. Boris Fedorov and Burkhard Bergmann are at Gazprom, Hans-Jörg Rudloff, Alexander Nekipelov are at Rosneft, Matthias Warnig and Yves-Thibault de Silgy are at VTB. No special changes in corporate governance were noticed after their arrival. As long as the main owner is the state, and the directives of the Federal Property Management Agency, and not the votes of members of the boards of directors, play a decisive role, there is no difference.
Where's the money, Zin?
Secondly, the discussion of changes in the system for appointing representatives to boards of directors overshadows the fundamental problem of the general inefficiency of the state as an owner. According to the Federal Property Management Agency, in 2007, revenues from the use of federal property amounted to only some 81.4 billion rubles, or 1% of federal budget revenues - and this is in a country where about a third of GDP is produced by state-owned companies! Huge pieces of property do not bring Russia any significant income.
Igor Shuvalov, in principle, also proposed an effective recipe - the state's withdrawal from control over enterprises. Not a new recipe, I must say. In the course of his presidency, the current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin regularly called for the same thing. In 2001, for example, in a message to the Federal Assembly, he said: “We already had a time when the state owned everything, absolutely everything; how it ended is well known.
However, what happened since then, we know. “The Yukos case”, “velvet” (and not so) re-privatization of dozens of other large enterprises, the accession of state-owned banks in the structure of banking sector assets, the actual stop of the official privatization of large state-owned assets in 2004: since then, as part of the official privatization program, the state has sold only small things, the rest of the assets were withdrawn to subsidiaries and sold off, bypassing official privatization procedures, through subsidiaries - as was the case with Rosneft, the assets of RAO UES, Gazfond, Gazprombank, Sogaz, Gazprom Media.
So for now, words. In order for the market to believe them, real practical steps are needed. For example, a new privatization program, under which large state-owned companies will be put up for open and transparent auctions.
