Shares in Gazprom, Russia's state-backed gas monopoly, fell 13 per cent yesterday after a member of parliament questioned the legality of schemes under which foreigners held the company's shares.
Mr Yury Saveliev, from the nationalist Motherland party, expressed concerns that a "grey scheme" operated by the United Financial Group (UFG) brokerage threatened national security because it could allow foreigners to exert significant influence over Gazprom. His concerns came in a letter to the federal security agency, the prosecutors' office and the interior ministry.
UFG issued an aggressive denial concerning the "grey scheme" through which its clients hold more than $2 billion (€1.6 billion) of Gazprom domestic shares.
The allegations helped trigger fresh concern among investors, already alarmed by the government attack on Yukos.
Gazprom, the world's largest natural gas producer, which is 37 per cent owned by the state, is the only company in Russia with a two-tier share structure that is supposed to protect it against foreign ownership. The scheme allows foreign investors to buy the company's internationally traded American Depositary Receipts but not its cheaper domestically traded shares.
The government has promised to scrap the ring-fence and liberalise Gazprom shares by the end of the year. But this decision now appears to have been put off indefinitely. Two factors were behind such inaction, said a senior official. First, Gazprom is a strategic asset and the state does not want to let foreigners in. The second is that "someone is making very good money on the arbitrage between domestic shares and the ADRs".
Several financial groups, including UFG, have found a way to circumvent the formal ban on purchasing Gazprom's domestic shares. - (Financial Times Service)
