Today, the new power centre's preferred board members appointed a new interim CEO who is a front-runner to get the job permanently. He is an economics and law graduate from a Russian university in a city called Tyumen called Maksim Mescheriakov. The new board said had been working in mining for 17 years.
Petropavlovsk has had an unstable power structure for years due to a 22% bloc of shares which gets habitually passed from one wealthy oligarch to another - currently Strukov's UGC business.
This time it had potentially been different due to the arrival of a western shareholder called Prosperity which has built up a 20% stake. While Prosperity opposed the Russian duo, it did not succeed in winning over enough shareholders to win the tussle. Prosperity said the combined size of Everest and UGC had enabled them to "overwhelm the ballot box".
The board also today appointed James W Cameron Jr, a non-executive director since 2018, as chairman and bumped up NED Charlotte Philipps to the role of senior independent director.
The ongoing boardroom battle has meant the company's shares have traded at a discount to other gold stocks at a time of soaring prices of the yellow metal.
Cameron said: "Our next step is to provide a robust and transparent governance structure that will command the trust and support of all stakeholders."
This would include engaging with the company's "largest shareholders and institutional investors" to understand their views and set up "effective corporate governance in future". The board intends to hire Citigroup and UBS to help in that.
Some investors suspect Strukov's main purpose from the outset has been to put gold from his other mining operations through Petropavlovsk's new, state of the art refining plant known as a pressure oxidation hub. The company has invested $400 million getting the plant up and running.
