AndSource Channel Messages for December 08, 2022. The Ministry of Industry and Trade is trying to recover funds from another company that did not live up to the expectations of the ministry at the expense of a state subsidy. Two years ago, a lawsuit was filed for the return of 500 million rubles to Baikal Electronics, which manufactures Baikal-M processors. But the Moscow one did not satisfy the requirements of the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The new defendant for the day was Crocus Nanoelectronics LLC, 100 percent owned by Rosnano. The amount of collected funds is about 460 million rubles. The rationale for the position is the failure to achieve target indicators within the framework of subsidizing. It is known that in 2016 KNE received 1.2 billion rubles. The money was allocated for the creation of electronic components for computer technology on 300 mm wafers. KNE wanted to launch the production of volatile chips (MRAM) for microcircuits and microcontrollers. Their production would make it possible to replace SRAM chips. But for some reason, the company focused only on selling NFC chips, and the planned launch of MRAM did not take place. Perhaps it is for this that the Ministry of Industry and Trade is now demanding a refund. Experts believe that the equipment of Crocus Nanoelectronics is tailored only for a part of the technical processes for the production of chips. In particular, it is capable of depositing metal layers on silicon platinum. But they must be preceded by semiconductor layers. So this technology has not been mastered at KNE, and before the sanctions, foreign companies were involved. The Russian manufacturer of integrated circuits Mikron has the ability to apply semiconductors, but this is not suitable for CNE chips. By the way, in 2016 Mikron wanted to acquire KNE shares from the French owner Crocus Technology. But the package went to Rosnano. According to sources, the state corporation has invested about 4.5 billion rubles in the project. Analysts believe that KNE will not be able to pay off the Ministry of Industry and Trade without selling its property. This is evidenced by the fact that last year the company's revenue amounted to only 52 million rubles, but the net loss was much more – 1.8 billion rubles. If we go according to the no-sale scenario, we will have to look for new investors. According to some reports, Rostat is showing interest in Crocus Nanoelectronics. The state corporation has recently been actively engaged in the development of microelectronics. Experts predict that the unique equipment for Russia, located at the KNE, in any case, will remain in the hands of state structures.
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The Arbitration Court of the Trans-Urals satisfied the claim of the Kurgan Regional Department of Economic Development against Aragatsstroy LLC (owner and general director – Karen Minasyan). The department sought the fulfillment by the company of warranty obligations for a previously reconstructed facility – the building of a regional business incubator. The corresponding contract worth 53.4 million rubles was signed by the parties in May 2015; the certificate of acceptance of the work performed was signed in December 2017, but a few years later numerous defects were revealed: cracks in the walls, roof leaks, falling off facade tiles. The contractor refused to eliminate the violations out of court, as a result, the arbitration ordered him to do it at his own expense within a month from the date of entry into force of the decision. Previously, “Aragatsstroy” has repeatedly become a participant in high-profile scandals and litigation. So, in the same Kurgan region in 2016, the FSB revealed the fact that the management of the company had transferred a bribe to the head of the Capital Construction Department Alexander Bublikov: the money was intended for a loyal attitude during the acceptance of work performed under government contracts. At the same time, the regional overhaul fund sent 27 statements of claim to the court against the contractor. In the neighboring Tyumen region, the construction of a multi-storey residential building for employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on the surface of the foundation slab of which deformation cracks appeared, caused lengthy legal proceedings. Numerous claims from customers led to the actual termination of Aragatsstroy's activities in Tyumen and an emphasis on work in municipalities (in the regional center today, the company is involved in only one project – the overhaul of a school on Gazovikov Street). The firm receives contracts in Yalutorovsk, Isetsky, Vagaysky and Uporovsky districts, where its management has the necessary connections. But even in these cases it is not without scandals. Thus, the execution of work under the contract for the overhaul of a recreation center in the village of Masali (Uporovsky district) resulted in litigation. In the Yalutorovsky district, agreements for the repair of roads and the reconstruction of sports facilities were terminated, several lawsuits were filed by Stroyzakazchik. But despite the dubious fame, officials continue to conclude contracts with Aragatsstroy. For example, in the Kurgan region, the firm received several major contracts, including the construction of a nursing home for the elderly and disabled in Shadrinsk (cost – 242.6 million rubles), the construction of an educational institution in the village of Krasny Oktyabr in the Kargapol district (422.5 million) and etc. Market participants explain the relocation of Minasyan's company from Tyumen to Kurgan by their willingness to offer low prices, the lack of strict control, and also connections in the inner circle of the governor Vadim Shumkov.
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A third of the deputy corps (12 out of 36) of the Voronezh City Duma was involved in criminal stories, where corruption reigned, fraud, where people's deputies vied with each other. And they managed to work in such a composition only two years after the election. The twelfth, perhaps not the last, was the head of the United Russia faction, Roman Zhogov. The party member was detained a few days ago and sent to a pre-trial detention center. He is accused of particularly large-scale fraud. He, according to investigators, deceived his associate in the party – the ex-deputy head of the regional executive committee and deputy of the City Duma Alexander Provotorov. The latter was the general director of VOMZ LLC. Zhogov's wife was formally assigned to this organization. With the help of such a scheme, Zhogov was going to receive additional funding for party events. But the money in the form of salary for fictitious work for 10 years (from 2010 to 2020) was received by the wife of the people's choice, and there they settled. In total, the woman received about 2.4 million rubles. A statement to law enforcement agencies against Zhogov was written by Provotorov when, finally, he realized that he had been cheated. Moreover, he handed over his friend, serving a two-year sentence in a colony for another fraud. According to investigators, two years ago he took 1 million rubles from the well-known Voronezh politician Alexander Zhukov for agreeing his candidacy to the party. But, apparently, the approval process did not go through, since the “decided” ended up behind bars. At about the same time, deputy Sergei Kudryavtsev was detained. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison for buying a plot of 5.6 acres for 2.5 percent of the real value. But he hid the fact that there was a bomb shelter on this land. The damage from his deal was estimated at 31 million rubles. Kudryavtsev also started talking only during his stay under investigation. He said that for help in winning the 2020 elections, he paid the head of the council of the Kominternovsky district, Yuri Bavykin, and his “suede” Svetlana Vaskova, 400 thousand rubles. Investigators found out that this duo helped eight more deputies get elected for rewards – the above-mentioned Alexander Zhukov, Ivan Kandybin, Dmitry Lukinov, Elena Gubina, Vadim Kletsov, Andrey Prytykin, Dmitry Krutskikh and Alexander Chufinev. The latter invested in his victory the most – 2 million rubles. The former vice-speaker of the City Duma Alexei Pinigin closes the fraudulent dozen. He, of course, did not buy himself a victory (at least, such an accusation was not brought against him). But on the other hand, he received more than 9 million rubles from the developer for assistance in the timely acceptance of a new school in the Gribanovsky district and payment for the contractor's work. Sources report that after the arrests of Pinigin and Provotorov, who held the posts of deputy chairman in the City Duma, Mr. Zhogov was very eager to take their place. But life decreed otherwise. Although he does not consider himself guilty and insists that the story with him is a political order.
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The share of the Polish restaurant holding AmRest Group in the KFC restaurant chain in Russia will soon be sold to a Russian owner. Earlier, the American Yum got rid of its part of the business! Brands, having sold 70 restaurants to the Izhevsk company LLC Smart Service LTD. The share of the Polish holding is much larger; it has 215 KFC restaurants in Russia at its disposal. According to the official website of the AmRest Group, they will be sold to the Russian Almira LLC, the Polish owner expects at least 100 million euros, but the deal must be approved by both the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation and Yum! Brands as the owner of the KFC brand. It is difficult to identify a possible buyer according to the Polish holding, since there are several companies with the name Almira in Russia. But of all the operating organizations, information about which is in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the most suitable for the role of the new owner of KFC is Moscow Almira LLC, whose main activity is catering. The legal address of the capital's “Almira” is an office in Armenian lane, 9, this is the historical center of Moscow. The staff is 270 people, the revenue in 2021 amounted to 448.3 million rubles. Technomax Company, established in 2019, did not show revenue data. She is engaged in consulting services, Yulia Lipko heads the organization. Until 2018, the Almira company was an active participant in public procurement, providing food for the personnel of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in different regions of Russia, from the Moscow region to the Urals and Siberia. From 2013 to 2018, within the framework of the 44-FZ alone, the company signed contracts worth 3 billion rubles. Selling its stake in KFC, the AmRest Group holding is one of the largest in Europe, in addition, it is expanding its restaurant activities to China. The company has been operating in Russia since 2007. Declaring an exit from the Russian business for foreign policy reasons, she sold her Pizza Hut pizzeria chain in June of this year. The buyer was the company “Noy-M”, founded by top managers of the restaurant group “Rostik”, which is developing its own catering chains. The deal amounted to 300 million rubles. Share of American Yum! Brands in Russian KFC restaurants was sold in October. The new owners, businessmen from Izhevsk, Konstantin Kotov and Andrey Oskolkov, owners of the Food Service Group of Companies, which operated 41 KFC franchise restaurants. After the closing of the transaction, which, according to experts, cost about 1.3 billion rubles, 70 more units were added to these establishments. The buyers decided to rename the chain to Rostic's.
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The Public Council under the federal Ministry of Construction headed by Irek Fayzullin is demanding that commercial structures – management companies – be banned from controlling special accounts to which citizens' funds are transferred for capital repairs. The pretext is the need to fight unscrupulous market participants who collude with contractors and deliberately overestimate the cost of contracts, resulting in theft of finances. Meanwhile, according to the estimates of the Association of Regional Operators for the Overhaul of Apartment Buildings (AROKR), last year alone, the contributions of Russians for overhaul amounted to 270 billion rubles. On average, residents of every tenth house prefer to transfer funds to special accounts. That is, we can talk about the annual 27 billion: these finances are trying to be controlled by the head of the ministry, Fayzullin. To date, 32% of special accounts are managed by management companies (MC), approximately 34% are controlled by homeowners associations (HOA) and funds-regulators. Of the more than 948 thousand apartment buildings registered in the GIS system of housing and communal services, only about 53 thousand are managed by HOAs or housing cooperatives, while almost 629 thousand are managed by the management company. will only grow, which does not suit federal and local officials. In addition, the overhaul program itself actually turned out to be a failure, and the Ministry of Construction is seriously thinking about restarting it or even completely curtailing it. As a result, the transfer of funds both to special accounts and to the “common pool”, that is, to regooperators, turns out to be inefficient. In the first case, they may be enough, for example, to replace windows in entrances, but they will obviously not be enough to carry out expensive work, for example, to install new elevator equipment or repair engineering networks. To do this, it is necessary to use funding from the “common pool”, only local officials have their own priorities for including residential buildings in the regional overhaul program, as a result of which the necessary work can be postponed for several years. At the same time, the “common pot” method includes a number of “gray schemes” that allow the municipality-related management company to hold a meeting of owners to approve a list of repairs, which is then included by interested officials in a short-term plan, under which money is allocated from the Capital Repair Fund. The presence of independent management companies controlling special accounts makes it impossible for corruption interference by local authorities and regional operators.
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The chief road builder of Chelyabinsk, Rinat Kuchitarov, was “closed” in a pre-trial detention center for two months. The head of the road management committee of the city administration is suspected of abusing official powers when concluding contracts for the landscaping of the regional center. The damage to the budget, according to the investigation, amounted to more than 40 million rubles. But this figure is not final yet. During the court session, where the decision on the measure of restraint was made, Kuchitarov and his lawyer asked for a written undertaking not to leave the place or house arrest. But the investigator insisted on taking him into custody, since the accused has a foreign passport, and he can hide abroad. Or use “freedom” to destroy the evidence of his guilt. The investigation believes that Kuchitarov signed a contract for 32 million rubles with contractors at an inflated cost. Later he put his autograph on a document on payment for outstanding work in the amount of more than 8 million rubles. After that, the FSB officers paid attention to this. It is noteworthy that representatives of the road committee were fined 438 thousand rubles for dubious agreements with counterparties. OFAS noticed in September last year violations of the law “On Protection of Competition”. The anti-monopolists considered the conclusion of contracts with the firms Artur LLC and NPO Sad i Ogorod to be non-competitive. Eight private entrepreneurs also appeared in the case. The department noted that officials, not wanting to hold an auction, divided the work into several small contracts totaling more than 3 million rubles. Kuchitarov headed the road facilities committee of the Chelyabinsk administration in August 2019. And a few days ago I wrote a letter of resignation of my own free will. It was on the day of his resignation that he was detained. This is hardly a coincidence. According to common practice, the higher leadership is warned that their subordinates will be “taken” by the security forces in order to soften the blow for other officials a little. Probably the same thing happened in this case. Kuchitarov was simply asked to resign on his own. In the year of signing the fateful contract for himself, Kuchitarov, according to the income statement, officially earned more than 35 million rubles, his wife – 212 thousand rubles. In 2020, they owned an apartment with an area of almost 65 square meters, 10 acres of land and an object of unfinished construction for 283 square meters. The last piece of real estate is, apparently, a private house in the Tarasovka cottage settlement. According to sources, he recently lived with his family in this house.
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Aktivo, a Moscow-based collective investment company, has acquired the Zeleny Bereg shopping center in Tyumen for 2 billion rubles. The buyer stated that he would not drastically change the format of the shopping center. He plans progressive development. Sources note that the amount of this transaction for the capital organization is a record. Aktivo has real estate in Noginsk near Moscow, the capital itself, Ryazan and several other regions. Its owner is Yegor Klimenko, and the company itself appeared in 2015. Over the past year, the net profit of the newly minted owner of the Green Coast amounted to about 100 million rubles, and the proceeds – 2.5 billion rubles. On this information about the buyer is almost exhausted. But much more interesting is the person of the seller – the head of the holding “Partner” and the former deputy of the City Duma Gennady Raznitsyn. His group of companies is engaged in construction, development, production of building materials, trade, rental of commercial real estate and other activities. In 2015, the then deputy Raznitsyn got into a big scandal with the construction of houses for migrants from emergency housing, the construction of which was carried out by the Partner-Stroy company. People noted that after the move, the new apartments were not much different from the old ones. Unless the year of construction in the documents spoke of their freshness. It was about three houses in Yalutorovsk. Residents complained about mold on the floor, walls, ceiling because of ventilation problems. From the window openings it was so drafty that even shampoo froze on the windowsill. In winter, the walls were covered with ice from the inside. And a resident of one of the apartments on the first floor could observe what was happening in the basement through the cracks in the floor. Representatives of the management company brought a bucket of mortar to her complaint, so that she herself would close up her problem. The local administration and the developer practically did not react to citizens' appeals, but only fed them “breakfasts”, probably waiting for the end of the warranty period for servicing houses. According to unconfirmed reports, Raznitsyn was covered by the head of the Yalutorovsk city administration, Vyacheslav Smelik, and someone from the regional government. Officials turned a blind eye to the “jambs” of the deputy developer in order to report positively to the federal center on the implementation of the president's order to resettle people from dilapidated and dilapidated housing. One of the experts noted that almost all the houses built by “Partner” have one common problem – freezing of the walls due to the quality of the blocks from which they are built. And the Porevit plant, which also belonged to the deputy holding, was engaged in the production of these building materials.
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Is Rosatom trying to take the gold mine (in the truest sense of the word) from Rostec? The issue is still unresolved, of course. So far, only interest has been shown in the gold mining project in the Irkutsk region. It is planned to order an assessment of the value of the assets of Techservice LLC, which owns licenses for the exploration and production of precious metals at two deposits – Gurbey and Svetino. Interest arose from the Rosatom structure of the Elkon MMC. The company is part of the mining division of the state corporation. It was created in 2007 to work at large deposits of the Elkon uranium ore region. The goal of the creators was to make the MMC the largest uranium mining enterprise on the planet. The mining and metallurgical plant is also represented in the Aldan region of Yakutia, where pilot work is in full swing at the Severnoye gold deposit. The necessary infrastructure has already been created. The shares of Techservice are distributed among three participants. The largest of them belongs to a company with a residence permit in Cyprus Arsanol Holdings ltd. She owns over 55 percent of the LLC. In second place in terms of the size of the package is Rostec – 35%. Well, the remaining interest is in the hands of lawyer Ilya Rybalkin. A fifth of the shares of the Cypriot company is owned by the general director of the developer “Airplane” Anton Elistratov. According to experts, the potential of these Irkutsk deposits is about 50 tons of gold. Last year, 370 kg of the precious metal was mined. This year's figure should approach the mark of 430 kg. Next year, according to experts, can become a real shock. Production will have to move to a ton per year. In the first three months of this year alone, the project's EBITDA was at the level of 400 million rubles. We can definitely say that the Irkutsk gold mining project is very promising. An estimate of the cost of a possible transaction has not yet been officially carried out. But according to some reports, the amount may reach 1-2 billion rubles.
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Aleksey Kudrin, who resigned from the post of head of the Accounts Chamber in November, took up the position of corporate development adviser at Yandex. Moreover, the founder of the IT company, Arkady Volozh, offered him an option for a 5% stake in the corporation, the value of which is estimated at $325 million. Kudrin is faced with the task of carrying out business restructuring, which consists in separating assets. The Dutch company Yandex N.V. should leave the founders, and a Russian legal entity will take its place, which will further develop such services as a search engine, delivery services and taxis. In turn, Volozh and his team, who settled in Israel, will leave behind the foreign part of the corporation, which will deal with drones, cloud technologies and an educational project. Currently, Yandex is going through a difficult time: since the beginning of last year, its capitalization has been steadily declining; last April, Yandex N.V. announced the suspension of investments in Russian and foreign projects, citing “geopolitical tensions”. In June, the European Union imposed personal sanctions on Arkady Volozh, in connection with which he was forced to step down as CEO and leave the board of directors of the corporation. Now Kudrin will have to act as an intermediary between business and government, carrying out the so-called “soft nationalization” of the Russian assets of Yandex. In the context of the upcoming restructuring, the position of the Public Interest Fund existing in the structure of the corporation, which acts as the holder of a “golden share” that gives the right to block the consolidation of 10% or more economic or voting shares in one hands, as well as temporarily suspend the head of the Russian division, remains unknown. The “systemic liberal” and “friend of the president” Kudrin led negotiations on a possible transition to Yandex back in the spring in Tel Aviv. His resignation from the post of head of the Accounts Chamber was preceded by a message about the upcoming closure of the Faculty of Liberal Arts at St. Petersburg State University, of which he had been dean for more than 10 years. Earlier, the Prosecutor General's Office actually achieved a ban on the activities of the American non-governmental organization Bard College, which collaborated with the faculty.
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