Micex chief calls for analysis of Moscow's role

The head of Russia's main stock market on Tuesday said the government's role in the ownership of the country's exchanges should be reassessed if Moscow were to consider consolidating its two exchanges in the wake of last week's stock market crash.

Alexei Rybnikov, chief executive of the Micex Stock Exchange, the country's main exchange for share trading, said the government's actions in closing down the market for two days and injecting liquidity were "timely".

"I think the government and central bank acted very decisively and very fast. I also witnessed a high degree of co-ordination between the financial agencies in Russia," he said.

But Mr Rybnikov, a former head of investment banking in Russia for JPMorgan, said the situation now called for "an analysis of how the Russian securities market infrastructure functions".

Russia has two exchanges: Micex, founded in 1995 and the main stock exchange platform, and RTS, a largely derivatives exchange. Both have cross-shareholdings by some of the same Russian banks, and operate different settlement systems and technology.

Talks have taken place in Moscow about possible consolidation of the two. Mr Rybnikov said last week's crisis had "acted as a catalyst" for the discussions.

But he said if Russia chose to consolidate, and later take part in global exchange consolidation, there should be a re-assessment of the government's role as a shareholder in one exchange and a regulator of both.

"We need to know the role the state will play in the consolidated infrastructure. I think that one of the problems that's emerged through the current crisis is the entire role of the state in the infrastructure: who the state is, is it a supervisor, a provider of liquidity, a shareholder?" Mr Rybnikov told the Financial Times.

His comments come amid signs that the fallout from the crisis could increase divisions between more liberal government officials and those who support greater state intervention.

Mr Rybnikov said that, while the state "behaved quite well" in the crisis, "at the same time the situation showed that even the regulators did not have the full spectrum of instruments that other governments would apply in a situation like that".

He said that the flight of foreign investors from Moscow had exposed the lack of a large enough domestic investor base to shield Russian markets from the worst effects of such crises.

Retail investors make up only 2 per cent of total participation in the Russian stock market as a whole. With a population of 140m that was "next to nothing", Mr Rybnikov said.

The small size of the domestic investor base meant there was "simply not enough Russian money in the stock market to support it when everyone else is flying away. We absolutely need to start addressing this problem".

However, he said that there had been a surge last week in new brokerage account openings to 7,000 accounts, compared with a normal rate per week of 1,500-2,000 as investors appeared to believe that it was now time to buy.

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