Nanoresults of five-year works

Chubais and the Void

Ilya Nosyrev, "Russian Planet"

Open Joint Stock Company "Rusnano" was established on March 11, 2011 through the reorganization of the state corporation "Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies". The company's mission is defined as follows: "... to promote the implementation of state policy aimed at Russia's entry into the world leaders in the field of nanotechnology." And one of the main tasks is "ensuring the commercialization of nanoindustry developments", and this formulation has been surprising physicists since the very appearance of the state corporation. "What is nanotechnology? – thinks Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Alexey Mordvinov. – Over the past decade, this question has become as sacramental as "Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Who framed Roger Rabbit?": after all, nano is not a business in 99% of cases, but a theoretical science. Even in the West, it is difficult to find examples of companies that would earn seriously from this technology industry. It is all the more interesting that in Russia five years ago, a corporation with the prefix "nano" in the name was quickly forgotten under the buzzword."

According to the scientist, this approach is initially speculative: some old technological areas are constantly being tried to pass off as nanotechnology - for example, polymer production or microelectronics. And Rusnano is quite a good example here: many of the company's high–profile projects are not directly related to the new field of technology. For example, can the production of aqueous polymer dispersions by Akrilan, in which Rusnano invested 600 million rubles, be considered nanotechnology just because its dispersion brands have a particle size of 65-95 nanometers? Recall that synthetic polymer molecules with a thickness of tens of nanometers have been able to produce for decades, and the technological process in the electronics industry reached hundreds of nanometers in the second half of the 90s. At the same time, it never occurred to manufacturers to brag about some "nanotechnology". "Words, words, words," as Hamlet used to say.

An unprecedented tablet

Other examples of "nanotechnology" are even more interesting. So, in August 2011, the chairman of the management board of the company Anatoly Chubais showed Vladimir Putin the "first domestic tablet", which journalists immediately did not fail to call the "Russian killer iPad". When Putin asked how much the novelty developed by Rusnano together with the British company Plastic Logic would cost, the head of the state corporation replied: 12 thousand rubles. As it was announced a little later, the device is not only a tablet, but also an electronic textbook: its potential audience should be schoolchildren. A gadget with a black-and-white screen will supposedly allow replacing heavy paper textbooks with a single lightweight and unbreakable device. In order for all schoolchildren of the country to join the bright future, it was planned to build a special plant for their production at a cost of $ 700 million.

Literally everything turned out to be untrue. First of all, the "first domestic tablet" turned out to be no tablet at all: in fact, the device presented was a kind of electronic reader – it allowed viewing various text formats on the screen, but the frame refresh rate, low processor power and the absence of a Wi-Fi adapter did not allow using the device for any other tasks. The gadget also could not replace the usual textbooks in schools, and the plant for its production in Russia was not built. When a plot of land in Zelenograd was already purchased for it, Plastic Logic announced a change in strategy: it decided to abandon the production of its own devices and concentrate on further developments in the field of plastic electronics. Meanwhile, Rusnano invested $150 million only in the technology of developing electronics on a non-silicon basis, on which this under-plan was based.

Russian "liberals" often accuse official propaganda of hat-making, an effort to "wipe the nose of the West." But what is in front of us, if not the mentioned desire to "fill up the tanks" for Steve Jobs, and frankly unfounded, in which the speaker himself, apparently, did not believe for a minute? However, if we recall that in 1992, in the era of distributing vouchers to the naive population of Russia, the same Chubais promised that the cost of a voucher in the future would be compared with the cost of two cars, the boldness of the statements is not surprising.

Nanoresults

The Rusnano company is promising in the truest sense of the word: the mentioned passion for loud promises, with the implementation of which problems immediately arise, is one of its distinctive features. So, in June 2013, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Chairman of the Management Board of Rusnano again outlined the prospects for future projects of the corporation. In particular, he promised to create in Russia the production of aluminum drill pipes with protective nanocoating. These pipes, supposedly having no analogues in the world, will have a service life almost 40% higher than that of conventional ones. "This product will be in demand not only on the Russian market, but it is an international class product," Chubais said at the time, promising that innovative pipes will serve when drilling in the harsh climatic conditions of the Far North. Rusnano was supposed to be engaged in the production of pipes at the Samara plant in cooperation with the Alcoa metallurgical company from the USA, but already in 2014 it turned out that the American company would do fine on its own – it did not need Rusnano's support. However, the production of innotrub has not yet been established.

And yet the loudest promise was made at the very beginning: in 2009, preparing to transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly, from the Russian Nanotechnology Corporation to Rusnano, the company announced a development strategy until 2015, which stated that in the next six years it would reach payback and become independent from budget funds. According to the forecasts of the state corporation, the total revenue of Rusnano projects in 2015 was supposed to reach 311 billion rubles with the volume of the nanoindustry in Russia 900 billion rubles. To say that the cart is still there is nothing to say: it rather comes to mind: "Where is my car, dude?" According to media reports, in 2014, the corporation's net loss amounted to 14.57 billion rubles with revenue of 6.3 billion rubles. And although Chubais himself claimed not so long ago that in 2015 the company managed to make a net profit of more than 8 billion rubles, it would be logical to assume that in fact we are talking about figures comparable to 2014. This is even more hard to believe after a report appeared in news agencies in March of this year that  Chubais appealed to Putin with a request to allocate 89 billion rubles from the National Welfare Fund.

Under the sign H

Where does the state money go? It's not hard to guess. Back in 2011, the Accounts Chamber checked the activities of Rusnano and noted a number of violations, including transactions with interested companies, financing of companies on the verge of bankruptcy and, of course, a lot of projects unrelated to nanotechnology. And in 2013, the Accounting Chamber published the results of the audit of Rusnano's activities for 2007-2012, where it was about even more interesting things: a number of transactions concluded by Rusnano had signs of money laundering and legalization, obtaining unjustified tax benefits and understating taxable income. According to the auditor of the Accounts Chamber Sergey Agaptsov, at the time of the audit, it was not established that there were any documents confirming the effectiveness of the 196 billion rubles that the company managed to invest. It should be noted that with such an unimportant work of the company, Chubais' personal income in 2013 amounted to 207 million rubles.

Chubais did not argue with the Accounting Chamber – he admitted shortcomings and mistakes: "Although we argued and swore, but a significant part of what the Accounting Chamber revealed to us were our real shortcomings, we perceive them that way." Further, the miscalculations were listed, for which any head of an American technology corporation would have left his place long ago without any "golden parachute". For example, Chubais mentioned "mistakes in the assessment of markets, quite often, such growth curves, unthinkable, which are almost never confirmed." The head of the corporation did not hide that investments were made out of such unthinkable mistakes – and this despite the fact that part of the same mission of Rusnano is "Russia's conquest of leading positions in the world markets of nanotechnology products." What kind of leadership can we talk about if the notorious world markets were evaluated in some fantastic way? As it turned out, there was practically no internal control system in the state corporation, and the personnel policy was so bad that in the course of working on mistakes, the company allegedly had to upgrade management by more than 60%.

It was not difficult to find signs of corruption. In July 2015, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on the embezzlement of 220 million rubles against the former leaders of Rusnano: Leonid Melamed, his deputy Andrey Malyshev and the financial director of the organization Svyatoslav Ponurov. According to investigators, in 2008 and 2009, Melamed, being a co-owner of the investment and financial corporation "Alemar", concluded a contract with this company for the provision of consulting services, and the former employees of "Alemar" Malyshev and Ponurov, who transferred to the corporation, illegally transferred more than 220 million rubles to her within six months.

Chubais has such a bad image that even his colleagues in the "liberal" camp are in a hurry to disown him – for example, Alexei Navalny calls the corporation "idiotic Rusnano", writes that already in 2007 "it was clear that this was all fiction, he drank the budget and positions for some muddy people" and is outraged, that "at every election, this Chubais is presented to us as "your liberal Chubais"." But – and this is very important to realize – this does not mean that Rusnano will be closed in the near future, and those responsible for its inefficiency will be punished. We still live in a country created in the nineties, and we play by the rules that were established then. In this coordinate system, Rusnano is quite a successful company. Creates startups? Creates. Does he invest money? Invests. What else do you want? When nanotechnology goes out of fashion, we will see the birth of some Quantum company with the same people in the leadership. Technology is transitory, Chubais is eternal.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  14.03.2016