The state is forced to pay off the company's debts to creditors
Answering a question during a WEF meeting about Anatoly Chubais, who left the country, President Putin linked his flight with the “hole” in Rusnano. Having headed the innovative state corporation for twelve years, two years longer than RAO UES, Chubais left behind an unenviable legacy: huge financial losses and debts to creditors. Which brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy and which the state had to pay off.
“There’s a big, huge financial hole there,” is how the president described the current situation at Rusnano. According to the head of state, “the activities (Chubais) at the head of a company created for the development of nanotechnology, from an economic and financial point of view, clearly failed.”
The head of the Russian Nanotechnology Corporation, reorganized into Rusnano, Anatoly Chubais became a member in September 2008. He held his position until December 2020, when he received the post of special presidential representative for relations with international organizations. His departure was accompanied by the transfer of Rusnano to the management of one of the financial state corporations.
Chubais handed over the company to his successors, to put it mildly, not in the best condition: the net loss of Rusnano in 2020 amounted to almost 53 billion rubles, and the volume of liabilities approached the mark of 150 billion rubles. After trading on all issues of state-owned company bonds worth more than 70 billion rubles was suspended on the Moscow Exchange in the fall of 2021, the new management team had to begin negotiations with creditors on possible scenarios for debt restructuring.
Then the financial position of Rusnano improved somewhat – at the end of 2021, for the first time in four years, the company managed to receive a net profit of 700 million rubles and reduce debts by 20 billion rubles. However, luck did not accompany the new managers for long: the very next year, the holding’s credit obligations began to grow, and at the end of 2022, coupons on Rusnano bonds for the first time in history had to be redeemed by the Ministry of Finance, since the company itself had approximately 30 billion rubles for these purposes. — was decidedly not enough. Moreover, in government circles there was talk of bankruptcy and dissolution of the corporation: officials even began discussing various scenarios for the existence of Rusnano structures in the future, and the holding’s subsidiaries began to prepare for auction. The new management continued to place responsibility for the formation of “historical debts” (as financial obligations were called in one of its releases) on the previous team and turned to the Prosecutor General’s Office with a request to check the company’s work for 2010-2020, when it was headed by Chubais.
At the beginning of 2023, the balance of the state corporation’s debt obligations was about 100 billion rubles with a maturity date of up to 2029. Debt costs are estimated at 135 billion rubles. There are clearly insufficient grounds for confidence that the company, whose obligations are still being tirelessly closed by the state, is capable of independently coping with the negative financial burden. The net profit of Rusnano in January-June of this year amounted to 2.9 billion rubles. Obviously, at this rate, the company does not have enough strength to resolve problems with creditors.
According to Candidate of Economic Sciences and financial analyst Mikhail Belyaev, criticism of Chubais and the top managers who helped him manage the corporation is completely justified. “Receiving government subsidies for a whole decade, Rusnano has not demonstrated any serious results, perhaps, except for individual products that are slightly used in the national economy. The company did not bring any revolutionary changes to the national economy, so we can safely say that budget money was spent, if not senselessly, then extremely ineffectively, the expert believes. — The new management is trying to reduce the debt burden. However, one must understand that the management organization in this corporation was “tailored” for Chubais. Under him, a management system was developed and government revenues were established. Meanwhile, the fact that Rusnano continues to be subsidized indicates the disinterest of the company’s current management in the necessary revolutionary reforms.”
