The article is devoted to Russian holding company groups. New sample survey data allow discussing the scale of expansion and internal structure of these groups, incentives to create them, the patterns of corporate governance and decision-making, scale of their internal financial market. In spite of the fact that holding company groups are extremely heterogeneous, most of them constitute new companies, which overcome the weaknesses of insider ownership model, with converged ownership and management. Companies in the holdings retain certain degree of autonomy in decision-making, and at the same time this process is connected with corporate governance procedures. Still the trends in the development of corporate governance are controversial and it is too early to conclude that the model of ownership separated from management inside the holding company groups has definitely proved its viability.
