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The Sovintel brand is to disappear this year - it is owned by Golden Telecom, which last year took over the remaining 50 percent that it didn't already own from Rostelecom. Equant, owned by France Telecom, is mistakenly still widely known locally as Global One, although worldwide this brand officially no longer exists since Equant's merger with Global One in 2001.
Golden Telecom has the most spread ownership, with 40 percent held by Russia's Alfa Group and the rest distributed between Rostelecom, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, joint Russian-foreign venture capital companies and many others who came in at a New York stock placement in 1999. Another operator, Combellga, is not seen as a full-blown competitor of Golden Telecom, since its main shareholder is the Norwegian operator Telenor, which is joint owner with Alfa of Moscow cellular provider Vimpelcom. Cellular and alternative operators are closely linked in Moscow, since the alternatives terminate much cellular traffic.
The other leading providers, MTU-Inform, Telmos, Golden Line and Comstar, are controlled by MGTS, but moves are underway to unite them under the ownership of Sistema, the investment holding company often viewed as the private arm of the Moscow government and which indirectly owns the biggest stake in MGTS.
The alternative providers' dependence on MGTS for number capacity and interconnection makes it difficult to assess the fairness of end prices for customers, since Russia lacks a strong and active regulatory authority of the kind that exists in the United States or some Western European countries, which fully regulate pricing and access issues between the incumbent and new operators. The suspicion is that MGTS tariffs to competitors of its own alternative subsidiaries could be excessively high, pulling up retail prices. The issue was highlighted in January, when MGTS asked Golden Telecom to increase payments for last-mile access (connection to the customer via MGTS lines) by several times.
"Golden Telecom's relationship with MGTS makes it vulnerable, because it competes with MGTS and its subsidiaries and is a customer of MGTS at the same time," said Vyacheslav Nikolayev, the deputy head of research at the Trust and Investment Bank in Moscow.
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