Information Disclosure in Russian Companies: A Summary of Papers Presented at the Second International Conference “Corporate Governance and Sustainable Business Development: Strategic Roles of Board of Directors”, November 2007

Abstract

In recent years Russian companies have been raising increasing amounts of financing from international capital markets. In order to raise capital from foreign investors, a company is obliged to comply with high corporate governance standards, of which information disclosure is an essential part. However, the research conducted by Standard&Poor’s rating agency gives evidence of that the level of information transparency in Russian companies is stagnating. One possible explanation of these results is the phenomenon of resource curse, described by Durnev A. and Guriev S. On the other hand, as Settles A. demonstrates in his paper, the success of selling any securities in the foreign market has positive correlation with the level of information transparence in Russian companies.