MOSCOW. Feb 10 (Interfax-AVN) - Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Alyoshin praised a public offering of 20 percent of shares of the Irkut aircraft building corporation.
"We have nearly never done that before, and our companies have been developing on their own. Even if they used some funds, they haven't gone beyond borrowing money from a bank," Alyoshin told reporters in Moscow on Tuesday.
The public offering demonstrates Irkut's maturity, he said. It shows that Russian companies are starting to use all positive elements of corporate management that their foreign competitors have, he noted.
"The fact of public offering alone shows that the company has focused on its own problems, tried to make itself more transparent and is trying to master present-day tools in the sphere of both investment attraction and management," the deputy prime minister said.
Irkut has planned a public offering of 20 percent of its shares for 2004. The money that will come from the IPO will be spent on 75+ percent of the shares of the Yakovlev Design Bureau and on the R&D and production of aircraft.
Irkut's shareholders are Brunswick UBS Warburg Nominees (nominee shareholder, 25.72 percent), Forpost Commercial Bank (nominee shareholder, 20.6 percent), FTK Company (20.35 percent), Sukhoi aircraft holding company (14.7 percent), Aerokom JSC (10.18 percent), and other legal entities (4.9 percent) and persons (3.55 percent).