Zee Beam News

08.11.2006 MosNews - The largest and most liquid Russian companies remain largely non-transparent and keep their vital information undisclosed, despite a wave of initial placement offers (IPO), which hit the Russian stock market. This evaluation was given by the experts of Standard & Poor’s international ratings agency. According to an S&P report published on Wednesday, Nov. 8, the Transparency Index of Russian companies represents an average score of about 53 percent as compared with the average 2005 score of 50 percent. Net of methodological changes, the improvement measures only 0.9 percentage points for the group of 50 companies included in both the 2005 and 2006 surveys, the report said. In 2003 the Transparency Index was 40 percent, and in 2004 — 46 percent. In 2006, 32 companies showed positive dynamics of their scores with an average increase of 10 percentage points while 18 demonstrated negative dynamics going down on average by 5 percentage points, the report said. “What these scores tell us is that although there have been some improvements, the overall trend in Russian corporate T&D is one of stagnation,” the experts said, quoted by the Interfax agency. S&P examined a total of 70 Russian companies, most of which are represented in the first and second quotation lists on the MICEX. In first place in the transparency rating is occupied by the leading mobile services operator Mobile TeleSystems. Steelmaker Mechel rose to second place from third a year earlier, and Golden Telecom was in third place. Long-distance call operator Rostelecom slid from second to fourth place. Investment conglomerate AFK Sistema rose by 13 places to ninth place. Among oil and gas companies the highest place was occupied by state-controlled Rosneft with 66 points. The state company, which carried out an IPO in the summer, was in the S&P rating for the first time and immediately overtook Lukoil (16th place, from ninth a year ago) and Gazprom (14th place, up from 16th).