Whether to quit from a Russian board is hardly a complicated decision
A notable name of the London Stock Exchange’s fresh 27-strong list of suspended stocks was PhosAgro, the giant fertiliser group backed by Russia billionaire businessman Andrei Guriev, the reported owner of Witanhurst, London’s second largest home after Buckingham Palace.
PhosAgro is chaired by none other than Xavier Rolet, the LSE’s long-serving chief executive until late 2017. He got the Russian gig a few months after stepping down. We are yet to hear from Rolet on whether he intends to stay in post at PhosAgro, but the general pan-European advice from fellow directors seems clear: it’s time to get off Russian boards.
Rolet is French, so here’s the version of a co-ordinated campaigning message from the European Confederation of Directors’ Associations: “Board members should question their mandates in Russian and Belarusian companies.” The UK’s Institute of Directors weighed in for its audience here: “Although directors owe legal duties to the companies on whose boards they serve, they should also feel a stronger moral duty to uphold the fundamental values of freedom and democracy.”
That line could almost have been written with Lord Barker in mind. The Conservative peer and former minister remains the well-remunerated executive chair at EN+, the Russian aluminium firm whose owners include the oligarch Oleg Deripaska. That is despite calls from Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, for him to resign.
Barker’s view is that, “whatever the optics”, he has duties to the company’s workforce, including several thousand in Ukraine, and he will not “shirk that responsibility”. It’s a point of view, but there’s no getting away from the fact that he’s sitting atop a large and important Russian company. The IoD’s view is the one to
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