At first glance, this story looks anecdotal. The company will spend more than $1 million (!) on payroll consultants for its executives. Whether they want to save money, or to earn …
But there aren’t many jokes here. The largest shareholder of Rosseti is the state. At the same time, the company now and then participates in financial and economic scandals, and its CEO Andrei Ryumin (who is also the son-in-law of the Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk) clearly expects a special attitude towards his person.
In July, Rosseti put up for tender a 70 million contract, which is called as follows: “Provision of consulting services to improve the remuneration system for managers and top managers of PJSC Rosseti and SDCs of PJSC Rosseti”. A few days ago, the tender was won by B1-Consult LLC, which until March of this year was part of the legal network of the British Ernst & Young, one of the world’s largest audit and consulting companies. B1-Consult has excellent financial performance. Last year, the company showed revenue of 8.3 billion rubles and a net profit of 25.7 million rubles. Contracts with the largest Russian corporations, including state ones, are doing their job.
What will elite lawyers do when working out a contract with Rosseti, which will cost the power industry more than 70 million rubles? The terms of reference (the editors studied a copy of the document) indicate that the income of the general director and his deputies, heads of departments of PJSC Rosseti and directors of regional branches should be subject to research.
Lawyers will analyze the income taking into account several parameters, including a comparison with the income of top managers of other Russian companies. The most mysterious points of the terms of reference are related to the introduction of an “additional system of long-term motivation.” One paragraph of the document raises the question of the feasibility of such a system, and in the other it seems to be recognized as a priori necessary, in connection with which the contractors (according to paragraph 7 of the document) must prepare drafts of the relevant standard documents.
If we take into account the long train of questions about the effectiveness of the work of Rosseti, the story with the tender could be started with one goal – to justify and give a positive meaning to the upcoming increase in salaries and bonuses of Mr. Ryumin and his subordinates. For a fee of tens of millions of rubles, third-party consultants will be able to flawlessly substantiate this innovation. Their conclusions will look much more weighty than those that the in-house economists and lawyers of the electric grid monopoly could offer for free.
There was an opinion that the not quite modern infrastructure of PJSC Rosseti could be closely connected with the large-scale forest fires that engulfed Siberia last spring. Storm wind in the Krasnoyarsk Territory caused multiple breaks in power lines, which led to the overlap of wires and short circuits. Rosseti Siberia is responsible for the state of power lines in the region. It is clear that the power engineers were not able to prevent the storm wind, but law enforcement agencies came to the conclusion that it was wrong to write off the catastrophe on the elements alone. True, and this time the case seems to have been limited to questions to the “switchmen”. The head of the section and two heads of production departments were detained in a criminal case of negligence.
Procurement and tenders by PJSC Rosseti and its subsidiaries is a completely different story. In July, Nasha Versiya talked about how PJSC Rosseti Volga purchased almost “golden” switching modules for Chuvashenergo from a single supplier. For example, the price of the item I Switching module TER_ISM15_LD_1(46) isp. 420 – (13 pcs.) in the procurement documentation was indicated 632 thousand rubles / piece, while according to our calculations, many suppliers offer the same devices at a price of 100-150 thousand rubles.
However, these are all trifles. Much more interesting are the methods by which the structures of Rosseti are confronting independent power grid companies in the regions. And here you don’t have to look far for examples. Let’s take the Kursk region for example: the only recipient of money for the service for the transmission of electricity to all grid organizations in the region, the so-called boiler holder, is PJSC Rosseti Center represented by the Kurskenergo branch. It is obliged upon receipt of funds from the guaranteeing supplier, which is JSC Atom
EnergoSbyt, to pay for the services of related grid organizations, including JSC Kursk Electric Networks. But the situation looks like that over the past two years, PJSC Rosseti Center, having received funds in full, can keep them on its accounts, paying for electricity transmission services with a significant delay and not in full.
As of mid-June 2022, the claims of Kursk Electric Networks JSC against Rosseti Center PJSC in the amount of more than 266 million rubles were under consideration in arbitration courts. What is the rationale here, you ask? It seems that it is very simple: while the Kursk Electric Networks were in a dilapidated state, by and large no one needed them. As soon as their capitalization reached a fairly decent level on a regional scale, people immediately appeared who wanted to take them into their own hands. The debt to Rosseti Center PJSC is clearly intended to make the independent company itself fall into their pocket. And this is not an isolated situation.
Approximately the same thing is happening now in a number of other regions. In particular, according to media reports, Tambovenergo (another subsidiary of Rosseti PJSC) not only stopped payments to Tambov Grid Company JSC, but also demands to invalidate the contract signed in 2008. Local residents fear that the confrontation between the energy workers could lead to a communal collapse next winter.
Some of the episodes of the activities of the subsidiaries of “Rosseti” in the regions do not do without criminal cases. In March of this year, the security forces detained top managers of Rosseti Tyumen JSC Nikita Kalinin, Pavel Mikhailov and Kirill Streltsov. Managers are suspected of taking bribes on an especially large scale. Again, this is not an isolated case. Earlier, Magomed Kaitov, the former head of IDGC of the North Caucasus, was convicted in absentia in Russia. The investigation established that he wrote off part of the funds paid by consumers for electricity to controlled structures, and thus stole 340 million rubles. According to some information, now Kaitov is hiding in Turkey.
They say that with all this, Andrei Ryumin can devote a lot of time to running a personal business. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, he is the owner of four companies engaged in “renting and managing own or leased real estate”, as well as “buying and selling own real estate”. How he manages to combine all this with the management of a giant state corporation is probably known only to Andrei Valeryevich himself.
However, among the top managers of “Rosseti” it is clearly customary to consider themselves the salt of the earth, and therefore “extreme” in case of failure to achieve the required indicators, they “appoint” ordinary hard workers and middle managers. On the Internet, it is not difficult to find a video from one of the meetings with the participation of First Deputy Andrey Ryumin and Chief Engineer of PAO Andrey Mayorov. In fact, he called for draconian fines in companies: “A person should know that if he does – accidentally or intentionally – some action that leads to a violation of labor discipline, safety and labor protection, he will be left without money, and his family will be left without a livelihood for a month.” Moreover, according to Mayorov, the violator should be “publicly disgraced” in the wall newspaper, and until this is done in the company, “we will not reach the results that we set for ourselves” …
What does it get? On the one hand, the chief engineer of Rosseti calls on his subordinates to recall the positive Soviet experience in maintaining discipline at enterprises. On the other hand, he will obviously be among those managers whose salary, on behalf of Andrei Ryumin, will become the subject of study of consultants with a foreign train. Are we threatening to put workers on starvation rations and immediately spend 70 million rubles on developing a system of bonuses for our loved ones?
