People in gray – Newspaper Kommersant No. 244 (7445) of 12/30/2022

The outgoing year literally changed the face of Russian business, at least the largest private companies and banks. The sanctions either pushed or directly forced Russian billionaires to transfer operational management, and sometimes even shares in companies, to hired managers, at least formally. But even if we consider all these permutations to be conditionally feigned, a change in the picture in the public field cannot but affect the real distribution of forces of influence. Moreover, the transfer of operational management to not the most famous professional managers instead of owners may not be the worst option for companies.

A change of leadership, and even more so of shareholders in large Russian industrial companies, until recently, was a rarity and became a real event for the market.

Many business owners and concurrently their leaders seemed to be permanent. You say PIK, you mean Sergey Gordeev, LUKOIL is Vagit Alekperov, Alfa Group is Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, Tinkoff Bank is obvious here. At the head of companies, even unofficially, they remained not even for years, but for decades, personifying them. The main players in the key sectors of the economy were known by sight not only in Russia, but also abroad. But after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, this advantage became a serious problem.

A wave of personal and sectoral sanctions swept across the entire Russian industry and the financial sector, causing a general change in top management: for example, in Sberbank, the entire board got on the SDN list. This was followed by numerous transactions for the purchase and sale of assets, which not only changed the face of the management of the largest Russian private companies, but to a greater extent depersonalized it. Once on the black lists, key and well-known figures on the market, such as Dmitry Konov from SIBUR, went nowhere: now he is simply a member of the Russian Union of Chemists.

The most common method of saving businesses from sanctions was to transfer control to family members (as, for example, Andrey Melnichenko, the former owner of EuroChem and SUEK, did) or to less public top management. So, the former owner of Uralchem ​​and Uralkali, Dmitry Mazepin, transferred shares to his longtime associates Dmitry Tatyanin and Dmitry Konyaev, and now he is formally only the chairman of the RSPP commission for the production and market of fertilizers.

Already in this capacity, Mr. Mazepin met in November with President Vladimir Putin, discussing with him the issue of resuming the export of ammonia through the port of Odessa.

Although it is difficult to bring all cases under one denominator without distorting the truth, in general, the former business owners continue to be perceived by the market as its real owners.

“It is clear that they can no longer conduct a dialogue on their own behalf, which to some extent weakens the negotiating position of companies, but, despite the loss of nominal ownership, former shareholders retain a serious level of influence on strategic decision-making,” says one of the market participants. As for lobbying opportunities, their preservation depends more on the dynamics of personal ties than on formal status, he believes.

Many experts even believe that the change of leadership and the removal of business owners from direct management of the business will only benefit companies. “Those who received the rights to actually manage companies in 2022 are in fact often great professionals and experts in their field,” one of Kommersant’s interlocutors believes. Of course, he admits, the new managers do not have the same influence in the industry and weight in the government as their predecessors.

Although the transfer of power in large companies that took place in 2022 was in most cases artificial, and at times outright feigned, the long-term impact of these moves can be significant. After all, the market has long been waiting for the “heirs” who will replace the oligarchs who built their industrial empires in the 1990s: such a change was inevitable even simply due to age. Hardly anyone could have imagined that the transfer of control would take place in such a form and so abruptly, but now it is already a fact: it is unlikely that it will be possible to return everything back, even if the sanctions suddenly disappear.

Olga Mordyushenko