Alrosa announced on Tuesday that it has appointed Vasily Grabtsevich as a special senior executive for managing relations between the two controlling shareholders of the company, the federal government in Moscow and the Sakha republic government in Yakutsk.



The federal government controls almost 51% of the closed shareholding of Alrosa; Sakha controls 40%.



The creation of the new executive post at the vice president level, and the naming of a trusted subordinate of regional president, Vyacheslav Shtirov, indicates the extent to which the new Alrosa CEO, Fyodor Andreyev, is intent on eliminating informal mechanisms and mediators, who have dominated the sensitive inter-government relationship under previous chief executives, Alexander Nichiporuk and Sergei Vybornov.



It also appears to be the first public signal that the behind-the-scenes power of Otar Marganya has come to an end, as Alrosa sources have also claimed.



Marganya, officially an executive of state bank VTB, was the acknowledged grey cardinal of the company and advisor of the board chairman, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. Insiders believe Marganya helped orchestrate the replacement of Nichiporuk with Vybornov in February 2007. Marganya's influence has waned as a result of the ouster of Vybornov in July of this year.



Grabtsevich, 59, comes from Belarus, and trained as a civil engineer in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Since 1976, he built almost his entire career in diamond enterprises of the Sakha republic, save for a three-year stint building power stations in Cuba.



In 1998 he became deputy head of the Mirny regional government, and from 2002 a senior member of the Sakha government. His rank until this month was first deputy chairman of the cabinet under Shtirov. Andreev's announcement says Grabtsevich "will supervise issues of the interaction between the public authorities of the Russian Federation and Republic of Sakha, and also the licencing of Alrosa."