22nd Annual General Meeting

May 30-31, 2019 | Bonn, Germany

The 40th Presiding Committee meeting and the 22nd IBC Annual General Meeting (AGM) took place in Bonn, Germany, on May 30-31, 2019, hosted by Wintershall Dea, Linde and Uniper. The meetings attracted 330 participants, including representatives of 88 IBC member companies, banks and organisations from 20 countries.
The Deputy Chairman of the Management Committee and head of Department of Gazprom, a member of the IBC’s Presiding Committee, Oleg Aksyutin, gave the President’s welcome to the Congress’s 22nd Annual General Meeting on behalf of the Chairman of the Board of Gazprom and the IBC President, Alexey Miller. He noted in his welcome address that the IBC today is a consistently growing independent international organisation, which operates on a permanent basis and welcomes companies and organisations from all over the world to become part of it. The International Business Congress includes 122 companies from 24 countries. Alexey Miller wished the 22nd Annual General Meeting of the IBC a productive and successful outcome of the talks.

The delegates to the Annual General Meeting were also welcomed by Sigmar Gabriel, member of the Bundestag and former vice-chancellor and foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the course of the plenary meeting, a vote was held for the position of the IBC’s vice president and amendments were made to the composition of the Presiding Committee, to the organisational structure of the IBC board as well as to the Congress’s articles of association.

The AGM expressed its heartfelt gratitude to Klaus Schäfer, Chief Executive Officer of Uniper, for his many years of productive work within the IBC, and accepted his retirement from the post of Vice-President of the Congress. Rainer Seele, chairman of the board of OMV AG, was elected as his successor in this post.

The new members of the IBC’s Presiding Committee are: Dmitry Kuzovenkov (Baker Hughes); Keith Martin (Uniper SE), Arnaud Le Foll (Total, Russia); Alexander Liberov (Siemens, Russia), Leonid Mukhamedov (Schneider Electric Industry), Denis Panasenko (Academy of Technology), Famil Sadygov (Gazprom), Dmitry Samorukov (Gazmashproekt), Shinsuke Toda (Mizuho Bank) and Han Fennema (Nederlandse Gasunie).

Further to the amendments to the articles of association introduced upon the decision of the 22nd Annual General Meeting, a new position has been created in the organisational structure of the Congress, which was chairman of the board. Alexander Medvedev, member of the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, has been elected to this post and will lead the work of the Congress’s board.

Given his retirement, Udo Voelker, the coordinator of the IBC’s board, has also announced his departure from the IBC. Andreas Boeldt, head of the OMV’s representative office in Moscow, has been elected as a new coordinator.

Delegates at the IBC’s 22nd Annual General Meeting listened to a report by the Board, approved the annual accounts for the 2018 financial year, agreed on the auditors for 2019 and approved the work of the IBC’s main bodies.

The second half of the 22nd AGM took the form of a conference entitled as “Natural Gas – Paving the Way to an Ecological Economy”. The Deputy Chairman of the Management Committee and head of Department of Gazprom, Oleg Aksyutin, and Parliamentary State Secretary of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Thomas Barreiss, gave presentations. There was also a panel discussion on the subject of the conference with the following participants:
Christian Bruch, member of the board of the Linde Group; Mario Mehren, CEO and chairman of the board of Wintershall Dea; Keith Martin, board member of Uniper SE; Han Fennema, CEO and chairman of the board of N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie; Jiao Fangzheng, vice-president of CNPC, and Timm Kehler, managing director of Zukunft Erdgas.

A series of bilateral business meetings also took place under the auspices of the IBC’s 22nd AGM.