Arkady Rotenberg eats from the hand of “Rospatriot”

Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Rospatriottsentr” (or, as it is written on its website, “Rospatriot”) is one of the country’s largest state customers of actions, festivals and holidays. In 2022, his portfolio of orders exceeded 1 billion rubles, and the largest order was received by the company of Arkady Rotenberg. Fontanka studied how this money is distributed among Russian business.

The full name of Rospatriottsentr is FSUE Russian Center for Civil and Patriotic Education of Children and Youth. The enterprise is controlled by the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, but its spending on public procurement is many times greater than that of the agency itself, which distributes the lion’s share of its budget through grants.

In general, the pool of Rospatriotcenter contractors is highly diversified. Of the 3.7 billion rubles played over the past five years, the largest partner accounted for 11%, and the top five – 40%. In total, 165 organizations and individuals became organizers of patriotic events and service providers.

Last year, the total volume of placed purchases amounted to almost a round figure: 1,000,053,313 rubles, distributed among 67 orders.

The largest was a contract for 246 million rubles in November 2022. For this money, the Moscow-based Granat LLC provided a number of services for the organization of the International Forum of Civic Participation “#WeTogether”. For organizing the same forum, but already in December 2023, Granat should receive another 168 million rubles three months later. Thus, it is this company that is the largest contractor of Rospatriottsentr with a total result of 414.4 million rubles.

Grenade’s revenue in 2022, against the backdrop of cooperation with Rospatriottsentr, jumped five times, to 531 million rubles. True, the organization of patriotic forums does not look like a very cost-effective occupation. The company’s net profit at the end of the year amounted to only 3 million rubles.

In the contract for 2022, it is surprising that with the cost of the services provided at 243 million, it is stipulated that VAT will not be paid on this amount, since the company operates under a simplified taxation system (STS). At the same time, according to the law and the explanations of the Federal Tax Service, the upper limit of income up to which the simplified tax system can be applied was 219.2 million rubles in 2022.

There is another feature of this contract – according to the contract, at least 50% of the work and the corresponding payment should be subcontracted to enterprises of “small business, socially oriented non-profit organizations.” There is indeed a note on the transfer of part of the work for 123 million rubles in the contract card. However, there is apparently some kind of mistake, because the same Granat LLC with the same address and the same TIN is called the subcontractor there.

Calling “Granat” with a revenue of more than half a billion rubles a small business does not turn the tongue, especially since its only owner is Arkady Rotenberg, the founder of the Yavara sports club and co-owner of SMP Bank.

“Granat” was established back in 2007, however, by completely different people. It was one of the companies in the Red Square studio ecosystem, the main content provider for Channel One. When the owner of the studio, a long-term associate of Konstantin Ernst, Larisa Sinelshchikova, sold it to Arkady Rotenberg in 2014, Granat was named a company that “is engaged in Internet support for the programs produced by Red Square.” Traces of this are now in the designated core business – “development of computer software, consulting services in this area and other related services.”

However, when Arkady Rotenberg personally became the owner of Granat instead of faceless offshore companies in Cyprus, the company began to try other types of income: organizing events for public money. Prior to this, the company under the control of the general director Vyacheslav Mironchuk as a whole did not live in poverty. And before the arrival of Rotenberg, and in the first years already with him, the revenue was measured in hundreds of millions, it seems, due to the continuation of work in the Red Square circuit. And then, apparently, it was time to go on free bread: in 2017, the revenue was only 71 million rubles, and the net profit was a symbolic 56 thousand. Apparently, having Arkady Rotenberg as a shareholder does not always mean living richly.

Back in 2016, the first pancake came out lumpy – the company was not allowed to hold the Abilympics championship of professional skills, which was planned by the Moscow authorities for 7 million. On the other hand, they managed to get a hold of a technical contract – the production of plastic panels for the photo exhibition “Flight over Russia” for Zaryadye Park (340 thousand rubles).

But a real breakthrough was 2018, when the apparatus of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation and the structure of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Forum Directorate” appeared among the contractors of “Granat”. For the first, Granat organized 140 small events, supplying them with equipment and paper, conducting surveys of participants and reporting with PowerPoint presentations. But from Rosmolodezh it was already possible to get real experience in holding truly mass state events: the National Youth Film Award and the Tavrida Youth Forum.

It was then that a new main activity was determined – out of 110 million rubles of cash receipts, 92 fell on the organization of state events. However, the transition to a new model of work was painful. in subsequent years, “Grenade” had to be content with only small contracts, such as holding an expanded meeting of the Ministry of Agriculture for 8 million. The trouble with finances is also logical. For the first time since 2010, the company had to live at a loss, and the black streak lasted from 2018 to 2021, when the accounting department managed to make a profit of 1 million rubles for the first time. Then it was possible to receive an order for 17 million rubles from the RIEPP State Institute for the award “For Loyalty to Science”, and this was a third of the entire annual revenue of “Grenade”.

So when, on February 27, 2022, Rospatriotcenter announced a competition to host the next #WeTogether forum, it really became a new page in the history of Granat.

The second in terms of the volume of executed contracts of “Rospatriottsentr” is LLC “Connect”. Its owner, Zaur Nasirov, is not such a high-status and experienced participant in the state order market, but the revenue is comparable to Granat – 522 million rubles. On the contracts of Rospatriottsentr, he earned a total of 353 million, but for this he had to get not two, but 11 contracts at once.

Before getting a really large order (the same size as that of “Granat”), I had to deal with smaller ones: organize the “Memory Watch” campaign (4.3 million rubles), hold an All-Russian gathering of leaders of historical reconstruction clubs (3 million rubles) , the “Festival of Great Changes” marathon (34.5 million rubles), the “Street Classics” festival (7.8 million rubles) and the festival of historical reconstruction (21.6 million rubles).

Only after a year of such work, in February 2023, having offered a lower price in a competitive struggle (unlike Granat, which received contracts as the only supplier), Konnekt received the right to become an agent of Rospatriottsentr for the execution of tasks within the framework of the federal project “Patriotic education of citizens of the Russian Federation”. The total amount of work on this lot amounted to 234 million rubles.

The exact amount of the agent’s remuneration is known – 2.3% of the total amount, or 5.4 million rubles. It is assumed that the rest of the amount should be spent by him on events.

After that, Connect managed to get five more contracts from Rospatriotcenter for a total of 46 million rubles.

Closes the top three contractors of “Rospatriottsentr” with an indicator of 340 million rubles LLC “Promotion Trade” Aram Amirjanidi, the previous organizer of the forum “#We are Together”. In 2021, he received 192 million rubles for its implementation. After this event was taken over by Pomegranate, Aram Amirjanidi did not give up, but organized ten more patriotic events for a total of 97 million rubles.

The most successful St. Petersburg contractor was Pavel Ivanov’s Panacea LLC with a result of 182 million rubles since 2020. Back then, the company trained coordinators of volunteer and youth organizations for 45 million rubles. Later, she took credit for the contest of children’s social projects “My First Business” (21.5 million rubles), twice held educational forums for representatives of the sphere of patriotic education (28.5 and 24.6 million), the training program “Voice of the Generation” (29 5 million), and this year Panacea’s highest-grossing contract was the program “Voice of a Generation. Season 4″ for 33.3 million rubles.

In fairness, although Rospatriotcenter is the largest state customer of Panacea, last year it provided only 40% of its revenue – about 80 million. The rest was brought by contracts from Rosmolodezh, committees for working with youth of St. this topic government agencies.

In particular, Panacea has a long and fruitful experience of cooperation with the St. Petersburg Committee for Tourism Development. Since 2018, Pavel Ivanov’s firm has been representing the city’s tourism potential in the Middle East, East Asia, and even in France and Belgium (in 2019), organizing visits of bloggers to the city.

Closes the top 5 contractors of “Rospatriottsentr” Association “War Memorials”, established in 1991 to ensure the safety of military graves abroad. Judging by the financial statements that have not been updated for a long time, the association’s income is mainly provided by annual contracts from Rospatriottsentr for the maintenance of burial places of foreign soldiers in Russia (approximately 23–28 million rubles a year).

Among other major contractors of Rospatriottsentr is the St. Petersburg-based Sinef LLC, controlled by the family of Artem Vakhrushev, the ex-deputy chairman of the government of the Arkhangelsk region, who at one time headed the local operational headquarters for combating coronavirus. The most notable order is the historical and cultural forum “Istoki” for 85 million rubles – this is already in April 2023. In total, contracts were awarded for 147 million rubles.

It seems that 2023 will be a record year for Rospatriottsentr. In the first 5 months of 2023 alone, more than 855 million are already being used (against a billion for the entire 2022). Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict the volume of orders for this year. The budget and financial indicators of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise are not disclosed in the public domain. They can only be judged indirectly by the volume of services and goods rendered. At the request of Fontanka to disclose the parameters of its budget and the amount of subsidies and grants received from the state, Rospatriotcenter did not find time to respond in a week.