A journalist’s best sources for SOEs are usually not publicly filed documents, but insiders, middle-management employees, foreign investors, competitors, whistleblowers in government, opposition party leaders, vendors or even customers.

A hedge-fund manager tipped journalists to shady prac-tices at Russia’s state-owned oil company, Gazprom, in 2000. Bill Browder, manager of The Hermitage Fund, discovered by reading Russian securities registration data that Gazprom’s managers were shifting corporate assets to entities controlled by friends and relatives.

Stories in the Financial Times, BusinessWeek and The New York Times eventually led to reforms within Gazprom, including the replacement of the CEO. Browder frankly admitted that he had a financial incentive for tipping off reporters. His investment in the company grew from $50 million to $1.5 billion as the irregularities were revealed.

The hedge-fund manager had the time, expertise and re-sources to unravel Gazprom’s complex internal structure and figure out what was going on. He then passed that information along to select reporters, betting correctly that media attention would put pressure on the company to clean up its practices.

The unfolding of the Gazprom story was examined at a conference sponsored by the Weiss Center for International Financial Research at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. Read about it at: http://bit.ly/IhYdK1