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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