"Sekret Firmy (Kommersant)" (Moscow), May 22, 2002

One day a blast equivalent to 50g of TNT occurred near the headquarters of the Aton investment company. Scared to death investment experts ran out into the streets. The police were calming them down, saying it was someone's bad joke.

Later on Aton similarly blasted the stock market by making Russia's first initial offering to all who were interested, commonly known as "the initial public offering" or IPO. The demand was so high that the share issue was five times oversubscribed, and analysts did not conceal their amazement and began suspecting some kind of a stock trick, because they could not believe that the capitalization of OAO RBC Information Systems was almost $85m! Actually Aton's valuation of the company was approximately the same. Jealous competitors (namely Interfax and Prime-TASS) started saying that RBC exaggerated its market standing and the number of subscribers, accusing the company of undermining trust for information companies once and forever.

Even if it's true, success is never blamed, considering that RBC's investors believe they will capitalize on the shares.

Kirill Kharatian