The property of the unsuccessful project of Rosnano put up for sale does not attract the attention of entrepreneurs
Factory lithium-ion Liotech batteries went bankrupt twice. The former head of the Rosnano state corporation, Anatoly Chubais, called this enterprise promising. As a result, investments in it amounted to tens of billions of rubles, and now the plant’s property has to be sold. Recently, the main production property was put up for open auction Energy Solutions LLC. This company was the legal successor of Liotech. Production lines made up five lots, and laboratory equipment, warehouse equipment and a backup power system – one each.
So far, the auction has been recognized as valid only for one lot. So, Novosibirsk entrepreneur Dmitry Starkov offered 703 thousand rubles for warehouse equipment. The remaining lots of buyers were not interested. The Liotech plant itself was declared bankrupt in 2016. At that time, representatives of Rosnano counted on the speedy completion of new, more marketable solutions that would help the company get out of the crisis. But even the creation of Energy Solutions instead of Liotech did not make it possible to justify the multi-billion investment in the project.
Billions down the drain?
The Liotech plant was created by the state corporation Rosnano together with the Chinese corporation Thunder Sky Group. The volume of investments in the project exceeded 13.5 billion rubles. The plant began work in 2011 in the Novosibirsk Industrial and Logistics Park. Anatoly Chubais attended the opening of the enterprise. He called the plant unique, since there really are no other enterprises for the production of lithium-ion batteries in Russia. According to Chubais, by 2025 Russia should take 10% of the world market. He also announced the construction of the second stage of the plant and the formation of a cluster of high-tech industries around it.
In 2014, the Chinese partners withdrew from the project. Work on the plant stopped. He never reached the promised capacity, after which the company was declared bankrupt. According to rumors, Liotech managers were engaged in the sale of batteries literally on social networks, since the products turned out to be unclaimed on the market.
Under the name “Energy Solutions” production was reanimated. The transport batteries of the plant were used in trolleybuses, electric buses, electric trucks, shunting electric locomotives and mining equipment. But then something went wrong again. In 2021, Rosnano put the company up for sale for 1 billion rubles. Energy Solutions was also declared bankrupt, as the company’s debt to the state corporation alone exceeded 9 billion rubles. It is noteworthy that this was not the only unsuccessful startup of Rosnano led by Anatoly Chubais. Law enforcement officers regularly initiated criminal cases, and Rosnano’s subsidiaries were declared bankrupt. Responsible for this now can not be found.
