MOSCOW, October 10 (RIA Novosti) Putin wants fewer foreign managers in Russian companies / President Putin sends United Russia rating upward / Conflict between secret services spills into the open / Rusal to build the world's largest aluminum plant / Kyoto Protocol will put Russia under strict foreign control
Vedomosti
Putin wants fewer foreign managers in Russian companies
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was displeased with the large number of foreigners holding top positions at Russian companies, and called for replacing them with Russian specialists in all sectors.
The comments come as a surprise to experts.
There are now few foreigners in the top management of Russian companies, said Pyotr Forro, a senior consultant with headhunting company Neumann International.
There are no foreign top managers in steel giants Novolipetsk Steel, Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Company, or Mechel.
The central office of United Company Russian Aluminum employs only three foreigners, said the company's spokesperson, Vera Kurochkina.
There is only one foreigner in the top management of Norilsk Nickel - deputy head of mining Tav Morgan.
The only foreign manager in state-controlled oil company Rosneft is its CFO, Peter O'Brien, said the state company's spokesman, Nikolai Manvelov.
The management board of TNK-BP consists of six Russians and eight foreigners. However, this makes sense, because the shareholder agreement stipulates that British Petroleum should appoint half of the top managers, including the president and chief financial officer, said the company's spokesperson. On the whole, foreigners account for less than 10% of TNK-BP managers.
Russian companies have to hire some foreign specialists, according to Stanislav Alekseyev, managing partner at Transearch/Top Hunt International. Russians are still learning the art of organizing production and supply chains.
Our losses would be huge if foreigners were to leave Russian companies, said Fyodor Sheberstov, managing partner at headhunting company Pynes & Moerner. "Hiring consultants will not make up for lack of experience. This can be done only by working together" with foreign specialists, he said.
A manager from a raw materials company, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Putin's statement is part of the nascent election campaign. "The decisive criteria should not be nationality, but managers' professional skills; otherwise it is chauvinism," he said.
A source in the Kremlin administration said Putin did not mean that foreign managers should be fired.
He recalled that on October 2 the president recommended that football clubs train Russian players instead of spending tens of millions of dollars on hiring foreigners.
The same is also true of managers: to be able to develop, Russia needs its own top professionals.
Kommersant
President Putin sends United Russia rating upward
Vladimir Putin's decision to head the pro-Kremlin United Russia's election list has sent the opinion poll rating of the party in power soaring. Sociologists do not even think it has reached its peak yet. However, rivals hope the "Putin effect" will wear out by election day.
In a survey carried out by Russia's national public opinion center VTsIOM, released on Tuesday, 54% of respondents said they would vote for United Russia, up 6% from a week before. The party's monthly average electoral rating has been fluctuating between 45% and 48% over the past 18 months. The increase was due to winning over part of the opposition vote (the Communist party and Fair Russia lost 1% each), as well as to those who had not been planning to vote at all or were undecided (each of the two categories decreased by 2%).
President's Putin's election rating also grew by 6%, as 66% of those polled said they would have voted for him if he ran for the next president. This must mean that most Russians agree with the United Russia leaders' claim that the next parliamentary elections will be "a referendum on trust in Putin."
VTsIOM director general Valery Fedorov confirmed that United Russia had not yet reached its peak of popularity. It takes around two weeks for information to spread across Russia, so the party's rating could still keep growing over a week or so, he said.
If his forecast comes true, "the Duma campaign will bring no surprises" and United Russia will sweep 60% of the vote, said Boris Makarenko, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank. However, there certainly will be surprises if United Russia is not joined by new supporters in the next seven days.
The fact that the party's rating was boosted due to previously undecided voters means that "the election campaign has not yet really started for many," Makarenko said.
Opposition parties are not yet anticipating any weakening of their positions. "United Russia's rating had remained static for six months. To give it a boost, Putin agreed to top the list," said Oleg Kulikov, secretary of the Russian Communist Party's central committee for information and analysis.
"But United Russia's rating will never equal that of the president. The part of his supporters who prefer other parties will not vote for United Russia anyway. The same situation developed at the Moscow City Duma elections in 2005, when United Russia got as little as 47.2% of the vote, even though Yury Luzhkov topped the list in December 2003, and gained 74.82% of votes," he said.
Novye Izvestia
Conflict between secret services spills into the open
Viktor Cherkesov, a longtime associate of President Vladimir Putin who heads Russia's Drug Control Service, warned on Tuesday of an ongoing turf battle among national secret services, saying it could weaken the government and undermine the nation's stability.
Cherkesov's unprecedented article, published in business daily Kommersant, followed last week's arrests of several senior officers of the Federal Drug Control Service by officials of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main KGB successor agency.
Experts praised his decision to resort to public politics.
Stanislav Belkovsky, president of the Moscow-based Institute for National Strategy, said Cherkesov was probably unable to settle the conflict behind the scenes by meeting with President Vladimir Putin or other security agency chiefs.
He said the power struggle within the ruling elite was entering a new phase, and that the conflict could no longer be settled by purely bureaucratic methods and through the use of force.
Belkovsky said public politics could be reinstated because the parties to the conflict were forced to use such methods.
It is very good that instead of covertly dealing with the problem a senior official has written a newspaper article for the first time in many years, and this provides hope for a Russian democratic revival, Belkovsky told the paper.
Boris Nadezhdin, a member of the Political Council of the Union of Right Forces (SPS), said no secret service chief of the Putin era had openly argued with his rivals and mentioned national-security risks.
Cherkesov's article proves that the power regime that has evolved in the last few years has failed, Nadezhdin told the paper. He said the article had been published only several days after Putin announced his decision not to run for president.
Nadezhdin said all Russian officials understood that no one but the president could control national security agencies and that Putin's statement had sparked infighting among secret services.
Business & Financial Markets
Rusal to build the world's largest aluminum plant
United Company Russian Aluminum (UC Rusal), the world's largest aluminum and alumina producer, and the government of the Saratov Region (in the Volga area) are planning to build the world's largest aluminum plant with an annual capacity of over 1 million metric tons of aluminum.
The second stage of the Balakovo nuclear power plant in the same region will be commissioned alongside the aluminum plant. Rusal's tentative investment in the project is estimated at $6-7 billion. Analysts say this will allow Rusal to maintain leading positions in the sector. However, they also mention risks connected with completing the construction of the Balakovo nuclear power plant.
The feasibility study for the project will be prepared by late 2008. The plant's annual capacity is projected at 1.05 million metric tons. At present, Rusal produces 4.3 million metric tons of aluminum a year.
The corporation created through the merger of Canada's aluminum producer Alcan and the British-Australian mining concern Rio Tinto will produce the same amount of aluminum. According to Alexander Bulygin, Rusal's director general, the new project will make it possible to boost aluminum production by more than 25%. Thus Rusal may annually produce as much as 5 million metric tons of aluminum.
Apart from the aluminum plant, the complex will incorporate the second stage of the Balakovo nuclear power plant (its 5th and 6th units) with a capacity of 2000 MW, which will fully meet the plant's power requirements.
Igor Nuzhdin, an analyst with Bank Zenit, says the construction of the nuclear power plant puts some obligations on Rusal, for instance, the need to maintain the power plant in operating condition. In his opinion, this fact alone bears some risks.
Vasily Illyuviyev, manager at BC-Otsenka Ltd., says that when the project is implemented, Rusal's capitalization may reach about $3-$3.5 billion. To complete the construction of the Balakovo nuclear power plant will cost about 90 billion rubles ($3.6 billion).
However, the expert says that it is not included in the federal target program for developing the nuclear power and industrial complex. The program mentions only the first, second and third power units with a capacity of about 1000 MW and "very modest tentative investment of about 10 billion rubles ($400.5 million)."
Experts point to a very good location of the holding. Sergei Krivokhizhin, an analyst with the Otkrytiye financial company, recalls that the region will supply metal for the Olympic projects.
Igor Nuzhdin says that Rusal's basic capacities for the production of primary aluminum are concentrated in Siberia. Russia and CIS countries consume only 22% of Rusal's products. "Probably, the company will be oriented to the European market," the analyst says.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Kyoto Protocol will put Russia under strict foreign control
Russia's thermal power sector and industry could reach the 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years. This would put Russia under strict foreign environmental control, because of the emissions quotas stipulated by the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a Russian scientist said.
Yury Golubchikov, a senior researcher at the geography department of Moscow State University, told popular daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta that Russia would have to spend money allocated for building roads and housing on expensive European emission-control equipment and fines to European officials.
In itself, carbon dioxide is not dangerous. On the contrary, plants need it to live and prosper. If none were released into the atmosphere, plants would use up what is left in 8-11 years. This would spell an end to life on the Earth, the expert said.
There is a catch in the Kyoto Protocol. Foreign experts have calculated that Russia, located in the center of the world's largest continent, could become a huge emitter of carbon dioxide even without developing its economy, because of global warming.
If the climate warms, melting permafrost peat bogs in Siberia will produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases, because permafrost contains the world's largest reserves of frozen carbon-containing gas hydrates.
Melting gas hydrates will rise to the surface, becoming gaseous and exuding methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Global warming will also increase the number of fires in the taiga, and fires also emit carbon dioxide, Golubchikov said.
There are none of these carbon dioxide sources in Western Europe, and only an expensive isotope analysis can distinguish natural from anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The Kyoto Protocol will become a fail-safe scheme for making Russia pay for air.
According to the expert, the threat comes to Russia not from global warming, but from international agreements signed to combat climate change. The establishment of an international market of carbon dioxide quotas carries many risks for Russia.
But then, who can guarantee that quotas on carbon dioxide would not be complemented with quotas on dirty energy in the future?
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