Money more than morals

It was to have been the world’s biggest IPO. Then several Western fund managers said they would boycott Rosneft’s $20bn listing because the firm’s murky past made the stock too hot to handle. Now it transpires that the Russian state-owned oil company plans to cut the float in half. It is tempting to link the two, and believe that Moscow’s decision is a response to investors’ newfound ethical concerns about Russia’s poor standards of corporate governance. But money rather than morals better expla...