Abstract. Corporate governance has been well known in the last two decades for making the attraction of investors its main objective. During communism, corporate governance was absent from economical life and thus quick steps were taken by former communist countries to adopt corporate governance, Romania and the Russian Federation are two countries that realized the strategy. Eventually after the collapse of the communist bloc both countries have moved in different directions based on internal and external factors. Romania has moved toward the European Union Model, while Russia experimented with building a different model by borrowing parts from Western values and at the same time using traditional values. These perspectives are clearly differentiated in Romanian Petrom OMV and Russia’s Gazprom.

Keywords: corporate governance, Romania, Russia, OMV-Petrom, Gazprom.