Investigators Focus on Former Top Managers, While Questions Around Senior Officials Remain
Russia’s Interior Ministry says it has completed its investigation into alleged embezzlement at Rosnano and has charged several former top executives with falsifying the company’s financial statements by 43 billion rubles. According to investigators, bank loans obtained under state guarantees were recorded as company assets. The state budget later had to cover Rosnano’s losses and the alleged theft in line with those obligations.
At the same time, claims against Anatoly Chubais himself remain limited to arbitration lawsuits, even though, according to the text, there is sufficient evidence linking the former head of Rosnano’s management company to large-scale embezzlement and accounting fraud. However, any deeper investigation would require formal scrutiny of senior officials whose actions — or failure to act — may have enabled the alleged crimes or may themselves constitute criminal conduct. This, the text argues, includes officials from the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry, whose direct involvement allegedly helped create the conditions for the violations.
The 2019 Scheme and the Role of State-Backed Loans
By 2019, Rosnano, under Chubais’s team, was reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy, as many of its investments had proved fictitious and funds were allegedly transferred abroad on management orders. Its capital no longer met regulatory requirements, creating the risk of bankruptcy, external administration, and an expansion of the criminal cases in which, even at that stage, nearly the entire management team was already implicated.
Against that backdrop, Chubais is said to have carried out a fraudulent scheme by securing state guarantees for Rosnano-backed borrowing at an interest rate of 30 percent per year, even though market rates in 2019 for loans backed by top-tier state guarantees were around the key rate of 7 to 7.5 percent. The borrowed funds were then allegedly booked as additional capital, allowing Rosnano to continue operating for another year while increasing its debt burden by 110 billion rubles.
According to the text, neither the deputies now facing charges — Podolsky, Galstyan, and Kasenkova — nor Chubais himself could have carried out such transactions alone. The scheme, it says, violated multiple Central Bank regulations, including the basic rule that borrowed funds cannot be counted as additional capital. If such a violation is discovered, strict measures are normally imposed, up to and including the revocation of a lender’s license. Yet major banks, including Sber and VTB, allegedly issued tens of billions of rubles in loans despite being aware of Rosnano’s financial collapse and pre-bankruptcy condition, while ignoring the change in the intended use of the funds.
Allegations of Institutional Cover and High-Level Responsibility
The text argues that such actions could only have been carried out with impunity if they were effectively sanctioned by Central Bank officials. It also claims that the gap between the 30 percent interest rate and the market loan rates of the period — around 10 to 12 percent — points to a corrupt kickback-based relationship among the participants in the scheme.
“One the one hand, Nabiullina allowed these illegal loans to go through,” the expert says. “On the other, Siluanov’s deputy, representing the Finance Ministry on Rosnano’s board of directors with the minister’s knowledge and approval, authorized these clearly criminal transactions under state guarantees instead of stopping them and reporting them to law enforcement. At a minimum, this amounts to abuse of authority and acting beyond one’s powers; objectively, it shows the legal признаки of an organized criminal group.”
The text also notes that the fraudulent scheme — which Rosnano management allegedly implemented with the assistance of the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry and which cost the state budget tens of billions of rubles — appears to have escaped the attention of the Accounts Chamber, headed since 2018 by Alexei Kudrin, a longtime associate of Chubais.
Siluanov, Nabiullina, Chubais, and Kudrin, the text argues, should all be subject to investigative actions under the Russian Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code. It concludes that the reasons this has not happened may lie in highly sensitive information allegedly held by Chubais — information he could make public if the authorities’ claims against him and his high-ranking confidants were ever to move from the civil sphere into criminal prosecution.
