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August 21, 2001
APCO TO RESTORE TRUST IN RUSSIAN OIL COMPANY
 

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is chairman of Yukos, Russia's second-largest oil company, is paying APCO Worldwide, a Washington, D.C.-based PR/PA firm, to restore investors' trust in the company.

The New York Times said Khodorkovsky met with reporters in late June at the company's headquarters, a 19th-century mansion in central Moscow, where he sat under a sign saying "Honesty, Openness, Responsibility," while he discussed the company's latest financial results with an air of friendly candor.

"It was quite a performance, particularly for a man who two years earlier orchestrated a series of flagrant corporate abuses of minority shareholders unparalleled in the short history of modern Russian capitalism," said Sabrina Tavernise, a Moscow-based correspondent for the Times.

In an interview, Khodorkovsky admitted his tactics in the past were too harsh, and he now believes "honest behavior in the short term is to your advantage."

He is working to right, and rewrite some past wrongs, said Tavernise, who pointed out Khodorkovsky used his Yukos wealth to repay Russian depositors who lost their savings when Menatep, a bank he ran, collapsed in 1998.

In recasting Yukos to look more like a company that investors can trust, it has paid $300 million in dividends for 2000, after years of paying little or nothing, and released three years' worth of financial results audited to international accounting standards, Tavernise said.

 

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