The government is preparing a series of decrees to be issued over the next few weeks aimed at bringing order to the country's chaotic stock markets in a last-ditch effort to win back foreign investors, a senior Securities Commission official said Thursday.


Andrei Volgin, chairman of the commission's expert council, told a conference of businessmen that the commission had handed the government a series of draft documents. The government, he said, intends to issue them as decrees from late February onward.


"Just a little longer and foreign investment will start flowing out of Russia," Volgin said. "That will be a catastrophe for the government, for it will not be able to get any foreign loans, and it will be a catastrophe for Russian enterprises that will lose their last hope of getting funds."


Foreign investors' confidence in Russia has been badly damaged by a series of developments in recent weeks, including the war in Chechnya, a political row over privatization, a series of scandals involving shares in privatized companies, and moves by the Central Bank to require special permission to make hard-currency investments.


The capitalization of Russia's stock market -- roughly estimated at $20 billion last fall -- fell by half in January, said Mikhail Kharshan, chairman of the First Voucher Fund, the country's biggest investment fund. Kharshan said Russian investors had followed foreign money and left the market as well.


Direct investment in Russia's privatized companies has also suffered, Volgin said. While foreign emerging market funds have amassed more than $1 billion in private cash, most have made only a few tentative, small-scale investments of between $500,000 and $2 million each.


The draft decrees are aimed at creating a legal framework that would entice investors back to Russia, including regulating shareholders' meetings, introducing guidelines for evaluating the assets of pension funds and introducing a uniform system of share registers.


The first decree, likely to appear by the end of February, would allow shareholders to vote by post, using a ballot paper that would be sent to them by the company. At present, shareholders either have to appear at the meeting in person, or, for a fee, obtain a proxy from an attorney.


"I am looking forward to this decree appearing," said Sergei Pevchev, a director of Uralmash, the Yekaterinburg engineering plant, which has 60,000 shareholders.


A separate decree, likely to appear in a month, will set out rules for keeping registers of shareholders. This will put an end to the practices of some brokers' who at present sometimes demand up to 20 documents and a 4 percent fee to register a shareholder, Volgin said.


He said another decree will establish self-regulatory bodies to govern the activities of stock market players.


"That will be a major breakthrough in the stock market's development," Volgin said. "Such things do not exist in other segments of the market. We shall see whether the market will be able to regulate itself better than the government."


Another decree will change the system of evaluating pension funds' assets from one based one shares' initial price to one based on their market value. Volgin said the government is also preparing a decree on Russian investment banks.