Topical Issues in Corporate Governance Development in the Russia's Electric Power Industry

Abstract

Corporate governance in the Russian power companies is developing slowly, and its importance for increasing their investment appeal remains underestimated. In order to identify the main problems hindering such development, the assessment of corporate practices of these companies was carried out. It was performed mainly as per the criteria of the guidelines of Russia’s Bank on compliance with the principles of the Corporate Governance Code, as well as those not included in its guidelines. The results obtained were compared to those of the TopCompetence Corporate Governance Center, the Platforma Center for Social Engineering, the Center for Strategic Studies at the MGIMO University, the Corporate Governance Index of the Independent Directors Association and the HSE University. We benchmarked PJSC LUKOIL that ranks among the world's top 10 companies in terms of the total shareholder return as estimated by the Boston Consulting Group. On the basis of a generalization of all the obtained findings we delineated the topical issues of the development of corporate governance. These issues were mainly concerned with the Boards of Directors and were grouped according to the stages of their nomination, election, current operations and performance evaluation. The emphasis was put on the issues related to the adoption of new managerial technologies.