Rusneftegaz feted the end of our twentieth anniversary year by holding our annual awards ceremony in Moscow three days ago, where we collectively celebrated the achievements of our personnel throughout the last twelve months. In what was an enjoyable evening for all our attendees, we marked what has been a transformational period for our company in which we finally realized many of the plans and visions set forth almost half a decade earlier. This is exemplified by our announcement in September that we will open our first international trading office, which we believe will become a key element of our commercial strategy in the long term. Whilst this is only one component of our broader global expansion plan, we are continuing to make rapid progress in all areas of our enterprise, and anticipate this enduring into the foreseeable future. On the night itself, our Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Aleksandr Filyurin, issued the following statement:
“I would like to send my congratulations to all those who have received awards this evening, this year we had a very strong group of nominees, and choosing the winners was very difficult. Each of them has made a major contribution to Rusneftegaz in some form, regardless of whether that has been over our entire twenty-year history, or just more recently. I always think that at times like this is a good time to reflect, not only on the last year, but on the twenty-year life of this company. We have obviously had our ups and downs, but I think that together we should be proud of what we have achieved. If you think back to how the oil industry in this country was back then, we have prospered when others have fallen, and now we are in the best situation that we have ever been in. I think everyone who has been on this journey with us should be proud of themselves, we have built something great here, and I think in another two decades time we will be reflecting on this as the beginning of something bigger than we ever envisaged.”
The major winners on the day were Kazimir Romanov and Stanislav Yakovlev, who were named as employee and young employee of the year respectively. The former was rewarded for his visionary work establishing our new operation in New York, conducting hundreds of hours of additional research to enable us to expedite this process ahead of our planned schedule. Similarly, the aforementioned youngster is widely considered the finest prospect amongst his peers, and has thus been duly acclaimed for his endeavors. At the same time, we also bestowed eight of our staff with special long-service awards to recognize each of those who have now been employed with us for twenty years, a remarkable achievement in any profession. We hope that we are able to distribute more of these honors soon, and will continue to do our utmost to acknowledge the efforts of each member of our workforce. We remain particularly grateful to all of them for another year of success, with the outlook for the immediate future being wholly positive, and there are many reasons to be optimistic about our imminent prospects.
