The state corporation Rusnano, which was headed by Anatoly Chubais for many years, found itself on the verge of default, having accumulated debts worth tens of billions of rubles. In this regard, the company held a meeting with creditors and discussed “possible restructuring scenarios.”
This was reported on the official website of Rusnano, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“It was stated that the accumulated disproportionate debt and the current financial model of the Company require adjustments. Currently, it is possible to develop compromise options for the development of the situation that will allow us to avoid the most negative scenarios,” the message says.
The Moscow Exchange urgently suspended trading in 9 bond issues of the company placed between 2014 and 2020. Their total volume is about 70 billion rubles. The Central Bank of the Russian Federation also suspended trading.
The “hero of the occasion” himself, who is now serving as the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation for relations with international organizations, flatly refused to comment on the situation with the possible bankruptcy of his brainchild.
“In 2007-2011, the state gave Chubais 105 billion rubles ($4 billion at the exchange rate of that time) to manage. As of mid-2021, Rusnano's capital amounted to $353 million, and only because IFRS allows part of loans to be counted as capital. This so-called “additional capital” amounts to $813 million, i.e. Rusnano has nothing left of the actual state money. Or rather, minus $460 million. Donut hole. Now do you understand why Chubais left at the end of 2020? Because by that time everything had been taken out. That’s all…”, liberal economist Sergei Aleksashenko explained the scheme for distributing budget funds.
Russian political scientist Marat Bashirov is confident that it will be very difficult for the new and fairly effective management of Rusnano to restructure its debts.
“We may not wait for a verdict on Chubais in some criminal trial, but in any private company he would have been chased with a broom to the very threshold. Behind the complex formulations lies a statement of a simple fact: they took other people’s money, it is not clear what they spent it on, and now the new management of Rusnano must somehow return their money to the creditors.
Because there is neither money in the accounts nor any income from Rusnano projects invented under Chubais. And this sentence is worse than a criminal sentence for those initiated. Why? All those to whom Chubais or people from him will come from now on will think a hundred times about giving or not giving money, looking at the results of his work at Rusnano. In fact, Rusnano is bankrupt, and only the state can cover its debts through our taxes,” political scientist Marat Bashirov wrote in his Telegram channel.
On November 10, information appeared that law enforcement agencies were considering the possibility of initiating a criminal case for fraud and embezzlement against the former management of the state-owned company Rusnano.
We are talking about the creation in 2013 of the Rusnano Management Company LLC, through which public investments were wasted on innovation. The shareholders of this private enterprise were Anatoly Chubais, financial director of Rosnanano Leonid Melamed and other leaders of the Russian corporation. The idea of castling was suggested to them by American consultants. In total, 17 criminal cases have allegedly been initiated in which Chubais appears.
After Chubais’s departure, Rusnano’s revenue increased 6 times, and gross profit 5,3 times to 15,3 billion rubles. Net profit amounted to 2,9 billion rubles, and management costs were reduced by a billion rubles.