Gazprom
What former General Motors president Charles E. Wilson said of his company - "what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa" - could well apply to Russia's Gazprom, the nation's largest company.
The line between state-owned Gazprom and the Russian state is often blurry. The monopoly's primary activity is selling natural gas in Europe at market rates to subsidize energy prices domestically. Several board members wear two hats and also work in government; for example, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the hand-picked successor of President Vladimir V. Putin, is chairman of Gazprom.
Still, the company controls more hydrocarbon reserves than the country of Iraq. So when it opened to foreign investors earlier this year, the capitalization spiked over $200 billion. Gazprom produced 545 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2004. - Andrew E. Kramer
Source: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/gazprom/index.html
Post a Comment