Tax benefits of the innovation center are used by businessmen with large coverage in social networks, such as Oksana Samoilova, Ayaz Shabutdinov, the family of Elena Blinovskaya. There is even a second “Business Youth” at Skolkovo. Their “innovations” do not look like breakthroughs, but this does not bother the fund: for them, it has become in fact an offshore and has itself established soft residency criteria. In recent years, Skolkovo has acquired consultants who help to quickly resolve the issue of obtaining benefits, due to which shortfalls in government revenue amount to billions of rubles.
In the recent sensational case of blogger Valeria Chekalina, prosecutors announced such a tax violation as business splitting: in order to comply with a low tax rate, the proceeds from weight loss marathons were distributed among several individual entrepreneurs of relatives for a simplified system and a 6 percent tax rate. The scale of tax evasion is estimated at 300 million rubles. Later, she and her husband Artyom Chekalin were charged in a criminal case of laundering 130 million rubles. The court forbade them to use the Internet and telephone, as well as communicate with witnesses, for two months.
Immediately after the attention of the supervisory authorities was attracted by the machinations of Chekalina, a number of sources appeared insiders about the upcoming inspection of other bloggers, some of whom are also residents of Skolkovo. But it will be a little more difficult for the tax authorities and security officials to understand the affairs of the latter.
What Skolkovo innovation looks like without makeup
The first example is the cosmetic business of beauty blogger Oksana Samoilova. Her Sammy Beauty brand (Beauty Innovations LLC) on the Skolkovo website positions itself as a competitor to Valeria Chekalina’s Letique brand. However, Bee Fit LLC by Chekalina paid 500 million rubles in taxes for 2021, and in the “Taxes” column of Beauty Innovations LLC by zero, it follows from the data of the Kontur.Fokus database (standard rates for VAT and income tax – 20 per cent).
At the same time, Beauty Innovations is among the top 40 most profitable Skolkovo companies in terms of turnover: sales revenue is almost a billion (978 million rubles), and net profit is 472 million rubles. That is, the profitability of the business is about 50 percent.
Three years ago, some smaller bloggers accused Samoilova of overpricing Sammy Beauty cosmetics. Then, immediately after the launch of the project, it turned out that both the website, and advertising, and the SB product line were copied from the Kylie Skin of the American blogger Kylie Jenner and that the products are made at the Mixit plant near Moscow, and they sell for about twice as much as Mixit products.
Beauty Innovations LLC, in which Samoilova owns 50 percent, was previously called Mixit Innovations. The owner of the other 50 percent, Marina Nazarova, is closely associated with Oleg Pai’s Mixit group.
Nazarova acts as a partner in joint Mixit projects with the stars: she has the same 50 percent in cosmetic projects with Anastasia Reshetova, Yegor Creed, Anton Dudkov. These blogging startups did not sign up for Skolkovo beneficiaries, but the Mixit group itself has two more companies that are residents of the innovation center. One of them, Smart Beauty LLC, is headed by Nazarova.
The innovativeness of the Samoilova and Mixit project raises questions.
Sammy Beauty’s Skolkovo resident card lists its mission as “development and production of anti-aging cosmetics based on the principles of proteasomal regulation of cellular homeostasis.” But here, at first, they made a mistake. The SB promotional materials contained the following thesis: “Each product of the Sammy Beauty brand includes the patented ActiRegX complex. Its main component is the anti-stress oligopeptide Recelline, which activates the proteasomes. And those, in turn, launch powerful processes to cleanse cells of toxic proteins.”
Recelline is a development of the large Czech pharmaceutical company Contipro, and the essence of this development repeats the goal of the new Skolkovo resident. After the scrutiny of Sammy Beauty, the mention of Recelline disappeared from the site and from marketing channels, but not everywhere. Until now, in the Instagram account (the social network belongs to Meta, recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation), Sammy Beauty has a 2020 video in which there is the same phrase.
There are no scientific or industrial patents in the “Intellectual Property” section of Sammy Beauty’s profile – only a trademark patent. But the Czech Contipro has patents for inventions with just such peptides (including in the Russian Federation, references to Rospatent: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)). Samoilova’s products contain the same component as Recelline in the Contipro brochure on anti-aging products – a peptide called Pentapeptide-60 s-Methanocaldococcus Jannaschii Heptapeptide-1 (plus the same excipients). However, the main active ingredient in Samoilova’s preparations is hyaluronic acid, the production of which Contipro specializes in. The company also supplies hyaluron-based veterinary drugs for horses, according to the Russian Accreditation database.
Against this background, it is not clear why Skolkovo issued grants-subsidies for 1.5 million rubles to Samoilova’s startup (according to the SPARK database).
“Marathon of Desires” and “Business Youth 2.0” are also Skolkovo students
To become a resident, you need to find your area of activity in the list, which is periodically updated by the fund itself, and send the project for consideration.
“Put emphasis on the advantages of the development over existing analogues, as well as on its novelty. Support the description with technical documentation: diagrams, drawings, photo and video materials,” the Skolkovo website says.
The examination is carried out by employees of the state fund, which, in order to improve its statistics on “intellectual property objects” and “revenue of residents”, is interested in the constant growth of the contingent.
Skolkovo has been inviting innovative cosmetic projects since 2018.
Such giants of the industry as Svoboda JSC, SPLAT, the Institute of Plastic Surgery and Cosmetology of the wife of the Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov were invited to events on this topic.
But they obviously refused. But after some time, various influencers pulled themselves up to the light.
Give a Dream at Skolkovo from 2021; this is a project of Alexey Blinovsky, the husband of information businessman-psychologist Elena Blinovskaya, who makes money on her Marathon of Desires course. The essence of Blinovsky’s “innovation” is the issuance of designer virtual bank cards “Give me a dream” from one of the Moscow middle-class banks allegedly “based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.”
In the Apple app store, the same developer is listed for the Skolkovo application “Give a Dream: Gift Card” and the profile for Blinovskaya “Dream On. Learn to make dreams come true!
This alone gives reason to assume that not only financial transactions for card “know-how” go through the Skolkovo legal entity, but also payments for Blinovskaya’s courses. Alexey Blinovsky has a second LLC with the same name, registered in the Belgorod region, but his reporting is almost empty, but the revenue of the Skolkovo LLC Give a Dream in 2022 increased to 48 million rubles. At least the structure does not pay income tax.
It should be noted that both firms of the Blinovskys “Give a Dream” are also in the register of IT companies accredited by the Ministry of Digital Development. They also have benefits for income tax, social contributions and other things – this regime is often combined with Skolkovo benefits.
Since 2021, Skolkovo IT specialists have included old-timers of the info business – business coach Ayaz Shabutdinov from Like-Center LLC, as well as co-founder of the scandalous Business Youth courses Mikhail Dashkiev with Units courses (the legal entity is registered with the Cypriot company Dovinita Ltd ).
Psychologists – sellers of “successful success” from the 2010s, who taught young people how to use Yandex.Direct contextual advertising, expanded, honed and carefully repackaged the product line, which, apparently, convinced the Skolkovo jury. By now, the coaches have connections in power structures: for example, Dashkiev is friends with one of the leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party, deputy Andrei Svintsov. Incidentally, Dashkiev’s Skolkovo firm has almost zero profits and taxes.
Skolkovo has become a tax haven
Signs of abuse at Skolkovo have long been visible. In 2013, searches were carried out in a criminal case of embezzlement. In 2016, the Accounts Chamber complained about Skolkovo to the Prosecutor General’s Office (the audit was carried out jointly with the FSB). It was reported that the fund is allocated too much budgetary funds (40 billion rubles a year), that there are too high salaries and biased declared results of work. The Prosecutor General’s Office, in turn, pointed out that the administration of the innovation center for too long did not make a decision on the early deprivation of the status of a project participant in relation to violators of the rules, which itself violated the law on Skolkovo.
The fund transferred almost $100 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) “for cooperation”.
But the exhortations of the security forces had no consequences for Skolkovo. The fund continued to be managed by billionaire Viktor Vekselberg along with numerous boards: the board of directors, the board of directors, the board of trustees and others. The positions of president, chairman of the fund, chairman of the board, chairman of the board of directors, and so on coexisted. In 2020, Vekselberg left Skolkovo, giving leadership to the head of VEB.RF, Igor Shuvalov. The strategic management of the project still remains with him.
Shuvalov worked as a lawyer for the oligarch Roman Abramovich back in the 1990s, and since the early 2000s he has built a bureaucratic career and became famous for his love for offshore companies, which surfaced in many journalistic investigations. It was Shuvalov who moved the implementation of the idea of a Russian offshore in Kaliningrad.
Skolkovo also did not escape this fate. A source in the IT community told the Octagon that after the start of the Western sanctions campaign against Russia in 2014, the Skolkovo center turned into an “innovative decoration”, in fact, it became more and more like a tax offshore.
The fund turns a blind eye to the lack of novelty in projects, to the fact that many “unique” technological processes, methods, IT platforms of startups are no longer promising, but ordinary.
In theory, an abundance of freeloaders could lead to further deterioration of reputation, restriction of preferential treatment, including for bona fide participants, to a wave of checks by the Federal Tax Service, but, apparently, this offshore is protected by a number of “influencers” at the top, adds the source.
The Skolkovo Innovation Center was established in 2010; five years later, 1,400 resident companies became beneficiaries. In 2021, the figure exceeded 2.7 thousand, in the spring of 2022 there were already 3.3 thousand residents, now it is 3.57 thousand. Lost budget revenues in 2015 exceeded 1 billion rubles, the Accounts Chamber reported; now the bill goes to the sums many times more.