Page 66 - UKRRptJun21

9.2 Major corporate news 9.2.1 Oil & gas corporate news
In a reversal, the 5-member Naftogaz Supervisory Board agreed on May 19 to stay on for a one-year term – on the condition that the current Executive Board remains and the roadmap submitted by the Supervisory Board on May 17 is respected. Clare Spottiswoode, the British energy executive who chairs the Supervisory Board, said yesterday in a video address to the Cabinet of Ministers: “We will carefully consider any good ideas and changes in the implementation of our roadmap proposed to us by the Chairman of the Board [Yuriy Vitrenko].” The Supervisory Board had quit en masse, effective last Friday, in protest over the government’s ‘legal manipulation’ on April 28 to oust Andriy Kobolyev, Naftogaz CEO for seven years.
Seeing Nord Stream 2 as a serious threat to Naftogaz , Yuriy Vitrenko, the new CEO is shaking up his international strategy team, the company reports. “To find new tools to counter the Nord Stream 2 project,” Vitrenko has hired Myron Wasylyk, former Ukraine director general of PBN Hill + Knowlton Strategies, as an international adviser. An American with Washington experience, Wasylyk has worked for the National Committee of the Republican Party, the State Department, and the US Department of the Environment. To deal with the Rada and government agencies, Vitrenko has Roman Suprun, who has experience in government relations projects.
At its May 19 meeting, the Cabinet of Ministers voted to re-appoint five members of the Naftogaz percentage supervisory board “for up to one year”, PM Demys Shmyhal wrote in social media the same day. The five board members, who decided in late April to resign as of May 14, agreed to be re-appointed, Interfax-Ukraine reported. Recall, last week, lb.ua news site reported that the five insurgent supervisory board members listed the conditions under which they would be ready to stay, including no changes of their working conditions for one year, no management board reshuffle in the company for one year, as well as the firing of the sixth board member, Robert Bensh. In her comments to Interfax-Ukraine on May 20, the head of supervisory board, Clare Spottiswood, officially listed the conditions under which the board have agreed to stay for up to one year, thus confirming the information provided by lb.ua. The conditions are: 1) no changes to the approved company strategy, unless they are approved by the board, 2) initiation of the process of the new CEO selection by Nov. 1 and concluding an assessment of the conflict of interest that CEO Vitrenko may have, 3) ensuring that the board’s power, as prescribed by legislation, is not undermined, 4) ensuring that there are no changes in the executive board by end-2021, 5) the vacancy of the new independent board member will be filled, while Bensh would be fired no later than May 17. At this stage, it is not clear whether the government has fully accepted such demands (at least, there is no information that Bensh has been fired from the board, while his biohgraphy is absent in the list of Naftogaz board members on the company’s website).
Yuriy Vitrenko has signed a one-year contract to work as Chairman of Naftogaz, announced Andriy Yermak, the chief of President Zelenskiy’s staff, at a meeting of Ambassadors of the G7 countries, Sweden and the European Union on May 13. With the Supervisory Board planning to quit the same day, the government has asked members to stay on until a new Board is chosen. The Board resigned after the Cabinet of Ministers briefly suspended the Board on April 28 in order to fire Andriy Kobolyev, who had served as CEO of state oil and gas company for seven years.
Naftogaz reported consolidated net loss was UAH19.002bn in 2020,
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