Word: stating
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...When the state-friendly Russian oil company Surgutneftegas held its annual shareholders meeting in the Siberian city of Surgut two years ago, the proceedings in the shabby auditorium started off as tightly scripted as a Politburo meeting. That is, until the moderator called for questions and Alexei Navalny took the stage. In front of some 300 stunned shareholders, Navalny, who owned about $2,000 worth of stock in the company, grilled senior management for several minutes about the company's minuscule dividends and opaque ownership. When he finished, there was a brief silence and then an unexpected burst of applause...
...corporate lawyer with a degree in financial markets, Navalny has spent the past three years snapping up small stakes in publicly traded state-owned companies, many of which have senior government officials on their boards. Public listings provide these firms with crucial capital and international legitimacy, but in exchange, they're forced to adhere to a modicum of transparency that is absent from Russian politics. This is where Navalny comes in. Exploiting his status as a part owner, he harasses senior management with questions about how their actions may be affecting the bottom line. "All you need is one share...
...possible for citizens to defend their rights." "While professional investors solve their problems quietly, this everyman, without status or power, is trying to fight the system," the paper wrote of Navalny. Sergei Guriev, dean of Moscow's New Economic School and an independent board member of Sberbank, a state-owned company in which Navalny has stock, says the lawyer's focus is a logical avenue of dissent for politically minded young people who are unable to crack into Russia's rigidly controlled political landscape. "His generation of opposition politicians has been denied a career in politics," he says. "They...
...Navalny's targets have included the oil and gas giant Gazprom, which was previously chaired by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, and the state-owned oil company Rosneft, whose chairman is Igor Sechin, a Deputy Prime Minister widely seen as Russia's most powerful official after his boss, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Navalny filed a lawsuit to force Rosneft to reveal information about delivery contracts it had with an obscure Swiss oil trader called Gunvor, whose co-owner is an acquaintance of Putin's. A Moscow arbitration court rejected the suit, saying the company was not obligated by Russian...
...Navalny's most significant investigation to date was into the alleged embezzlement of $150 million by officials at a subsidiary of the state-owned bank VTB following the company's purchase of 30 Chinese oil rigs in 2007. His report electrified Russian Netizens when he published it on his blog in November. Authorities initially declined to open a criminal investigation into the deal, saying there were insufficient grounds to do so, but last month Moscow prosecutors sent the case back to the police for further review, which is ongoing. For Navalny, forcing his opponents into a dialogue is often victory...