The "Chubais" tablet turned out to be another embezzlement. A KOMPROMAT RU correspondent reports that billions of rubles were squandered at "Rosnano" thanks to this project.

A Moscow court has sent Boris Galkin, CEO of Plastic Logic LLC, to pretrial detention on charges of embezzling money from Rusnano. The situation has its roots in the era when the state corporation was headed by young reformer Anatoly Chubais.

Chubais’s tablet

In 2010-2012, Rusnano invested 7.1 billion rubles (the dollar exchange rate at that time was around 32 rubles per unit) in the Irish developer of non-silicon displays Plastic Logic and acquired 43.84% of the company’s shares. In February 2015, Rusnano bought 100% of the shares of Plastic Logic CJSC (the structure was Russified), and a few years later transformed it into an LLC. The deal was lobbied by Chubais, who called Plastic Logic practically the only owner of flexible screen technology without backlighting in the world.

Chubais claimed that this approach to energy efficiency would surpass Apple’s achievements, and in 2011 he managed to demonstrate a tablet of his own production.

Anatoly Chubais. Photo: https://www.ixbt.com/news/2024/02/06/na-rossijskij-gibkij-planshet-chubajsa-potracheny-milliardy-kompanija-obankrotilas-plansheta-net.html

Chubais called the Plastic Logic 100 device a promising model of a school tablet. Apparently, the state allocated money for this project under this sauce, but 13 years have passed, and "Chubais’s tablet" has remained a joke.

Withdrawal of money to Luxembourg

The regulatory authorities became interested in the project back in 2014. The Accounts Chamber found out that the money that Rusnano paid for Plastic Logic Holding was immediately transferred to the accounts of Plastic Logic Luxemburg. At the same time, Plastic Logic CJSC was created in the Russian Federation, which, under the guarantee of Rusnano, immediately took out loans in Russian banks for 5.7 billion rubles and transferred the funds received as a loan to Plastic Logic Luxemburg.

Photo: Rusprofile.ru

And then there’s more: the money was issued by a Russian organization at a low interest rate - apparently lower than the loan, and then used by Plastic Logic Luxemburg to buy out shares of ZAO Plastic Logic. Thus, the Luxembourg company ended up with over 5 billion rubles, and the Russian company with 620 million rubles.

In 2015, Chubais admitted that the project had failed and said that his company had failed to create a tablet for schools that was competitive in price. The explanations are ridiculous. Why the most advanced technologies for a utilitarian item? If such goals were really spelled out in this adventure, then this is a typical embezzlement of state money. The financial machinations of ZAO Plastic Logic and Plastic Logic Luxemburg only confirm this.

Prosecutor’s inspection

It is interesting that Chubais did not abandon the project in 2015. Rusnano had been trying to attract investors to the "Chubais tablet" for several years. Chubais left Rusnano in 2020, and two years later it turned out that Plastic Logic LLC was constantly generating losses. In 2022, it amounted to 702.4 million rubles, that is, three times more than in 2021. As a result of all this, the new management of Rusnano decided to ask the Prosecutor’s Office to check the subsidiary.

Boris Galkin. Photo: https://dzen.ru/news/by/story/915e2fe3-e877-5f62-a994-d61cb2f0b02d

In April 2023, a criminal case was opened against former CEO Galkin on charges of embezzlement on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), and in February 2024, Rusnano initiated bankruptcy of its subsidiary. And now, a year and a half later, the case has led to Galkin’s arrest.

At this rate, you won’t catch Chubais - the "father" of the voucher left the country after the start of the SVO and distinguished himself abroad with an act of patriotism towards Israel. The situation is also strange in that no charges were ever brought against Chubais.

With the support of Sobyanin

LLC "Plastic Logic" was liquidated on May 15, 2024. The organization had a free mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., as befits a technology giant. Galkin headed this structure from 2012 to 2016, when the structure existed in the form of a joint-stock company. It was at this time that the scam to withdraw money to Luxembourg occurred.

Photo: Rusprofile.ru

After leaving Plastic Logic, Galkin continued to promote the "Chubais tablet", but in a new form. He became the head of the "Russian Flexible Electronics Center" of the TechnoSpark group of companies. In March 2020, Chubais, together with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, opened this institution in the TechnoSpark technology park in Troitsk. In fact, this is a direct development of the "Chubais tablet", but with the participation of the Moscow mayor’s office.

Now Technospark is headed by Denis Kovalevich, a former Rosatom employee, who was first transferred to Skolkovo and then to a new project with Rusnano. So this story involves not only Chubais, but also other major players.

Macrocorruption in Rusnano

The SVO showed that nanotechnologies from "Rosnano", to which billions of rubles were written off, gave nothing to the country. Dependence on imports was huge, and remains so, and industry does not have its own technologies to replace Western ones. This is the result of all these "Chubais tablets", as a result of which a criminal case arose against OOO "Plastic Logic".

Chubais’s flight abroad had one unconditional advantage: law enforcement agencies took Rosnano seriously and, it seems, will not let this organization go.

Oleg Kiselev. Photo: https://www.rusnano.com/news/20190715-rosnano-dmitry-pimkin-naznachen-zamestitelem-predsedatelya-pravleniya/

In April, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation brought charges against former Rusnano top managers and Chubais associates Oleg Kiselev and Oleg Dyachenko for embezzling 1.676 billion rubles from the state corporation. In 2012-2015, they withdrew this money through the Cyprus offshore company Nanoenergo Fund Limited, which was owned by Rusnano and the Peresvet bank, using fictitious loans. Exactly the same embezzlement scheme was used in Plastic Logic.

In addition to Dyachenko and Kiselev, charges have been brought against Irina Rapoport (former managing director of Rusnano) and Alexander Shvets (chairman of the board of Peresvet Bank). All four are charged with embezzlement on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Galkin was arrested under the same charge, so this is a standard scheme for Rusnano.

In the fall of 2023, the head of a subsidiary of Rusnano (OOO NTpharma) Valery Glavatsky was sentenced in absentia to 7 years for embezzlement of 424 million rubles; the case of Rusnano managing director Nail Gubaev for embezzlement of 180 million rubles is in court.

One has to agree with the State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein that the only nanotechnology successfully applied by Chubais’s team was macro-theft. And what about Chubais? The odious liberal opened the Center for Russian Studies at the local university’s Faculty of Social Sciences in Tel Aviv. Everything is fine, except that the Israelis won’t let him steal, and the young reformer will have to spend the money he earned while managing Rusnano.