Novatek: the arrest of top manager Mark Gitvay will not affect the company’s work

Novatek believes that the arrest of the top manager of the company in the United States will not affect its work. Papers of Russia's second producer of natural gas lose more than 1% on this news on Friday.

Novatek said in a commentary that the arrest of the company's financial director Mark Jitway in the United States would not affect the work of the enterprise. The company added that it has not yet received "any official requests or other documents from the authorities of the United States or other countries regarding Mark Jitway" and are now investigating the circumstances of the incident. Igor Yurgens, board member of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, also told Ekho Moskvy that Jitway's arrest is unlikely to have a negative impact on Novatek's image.

Despite the assurances of the company, while the company's shares are falling. At the beginning of trading on the Moscow Exchange, the fall in Novatek quotes exceeded 4% compared to the price at the close of trading on Thursday. By 12.30 Moscow time, the company's papers won back part of the losses, but kept falling at the level of 1.4%.

• Today it became known that the deputy chairman of the board of Novatek, Mark Anthony Jitway, was arrested in the United States on charges of tax evasion. He faces decades in prison. The prosecution believes that from 2005 to 2016, Jitway concealed information about his offshore assets in order to avoid paying income taxes. According to the prosecution, he kept the funds received from options and bonuses in Swiss bank accounts and purposefully concealed control over them. To do this, the businessman who opened the accounts subsequently indicated his wife, a Russian citizen, as their beneficiary. Their total volume at the peak, according to the American tax authorities, reached $93 million.
• Jitway moved to Moscow in 1995. From 2003 to 2014, he was the chief financial officer of Novatek and was a member of the board of directors, and since August 2007 he has been on the company's board. Since 2010, he has been the Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Jitway. In 2019, an American, by decree of Vladimir Putin, received Russian citizenship.