International rating agency S&P has decided to upgrade NTW’s managerial performance, specifically the operator’s information transparency.

A study performed by S&P’s corporate governance department with input from MICEX, rated NWT’s transparency index at 62%, which makes it 8^th among Russia’s 50 largest companies listed on MICEX.

Experts note the high “Level of disclosure on the salaries of executives and top manager”: NWT is one of five companies whose rating exceeds 50%.  In addition, NWT leads in terms of overall improvement, rising by 12 positions to emerge at a level better than average.

As noted by S&P experts, “the improvements came mainly on the back of the company’s aspiration to make its shares and debt instruments more attractive to foreign investors, which was achieved mainly by increasing the volume of information available in English, greater scale of information disclosed in annual financial statements, improvements in financial reporting and operating activities as well as the volume of information placed on its corporate web site”.

Commenting on this event, NWT CEO V.A. Akulich said that “the company will try to keep up the good work and continue to scale up its information transparency, raise the quality of its corporate governance and reward the trust of its investors. The business pursued by NWT involves phasing in information disclosure standards which approximate best world practice.

Standard & Poor’s assesses the average level of corporate transparency based on the maximum level desirable for “the prudent investor”, i.e. the full amount of readily available information on the key issues of operating activity, efficiency and mechanisms of corporate governance at the company.  The study is based on the analysis of information disclosure mainly from the standpoint of international investors.  For this reason, it takes into account not only the availability of information not only in Russian, but also in English.  The main issues involved in the evaluation were as follows:

• ownership structure and investor relations;

• financialandoperatinginformation;

• content and viability of operations performed by BoD and management;

The study takes into account all information included in annual financial statements and all reports posted on the Internet as of August 13, 2004.