A new, previously hidden plot has emerged in the convoluted story surrounding the lawsuits and criminal cases filed by RUSNANO against Anatoly Chubais and his team. According to a source at the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, what many thought was a banal corporate conflict, a fight against corruption, turned out to be an elegant, multi-move power struggle within the vertical power structure, a reflection of the quiet but brutal bureaucratic war between the head of the Administration of the President, Anton Vaino, on one side, and his deputy, Sergei Kiriyenko, on the other. The catalyst for these events was RUSNANO head Sergei Kulikov, who had long and unsuccessfully tried to "combat Chubais's difficult legacy."
Since 2023, RUSNANO has been literally bombarding the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service, and the Prosecutor's Office with all sorts of reports describing the situation both within RUSNANO and in the project companies. However, in some cases, the facts were lacking, in others, the composition of the reports was completely tenuous, and in others, RUSNANO itself stalled the cases – as a result, no cases were opened, and civil lawsuits were not initiated.
According to the source, in the spring of 2024, a memo from Kulikov on the situation at RUSNANO landed on Vaino's desk. The memo addressed issues related to the repayment of the state corporation's loans and borrowings, but the appendices detailed very specific cases: the Plastic Logic project, Liotech, Crocus, and the situation with obtaining loans without state guarantees. A dull report attracted attention because of the high-profile names involved: Nabiullina and Siluanov were responsible for issuing bonds, while Kiriyenko, Fursenko, and a host of others were responsible for approving a number of failed projects. These comrades, as members of the supervisory board of the Rusnanotech State Corporation, gave final approval to "obviously unprofitable projects."
This is what sealed the deal. They started from afar, with the heads of the project companies. Chubais wasn't prosecuted at the outset, but his turn came later.
The trigger for all these processes, however, wasn't Chubais himself, but the presence of potential high-ranking figures in the cases, who were bound to emerge and did emerge during the investigation. First and foremost, Kiriyenko, a longtime associate of Chubais.
It was only later that life separated Kiriyenko and Chubais, to the point where one became too toxic for the other. Before that, everything was fine. There are so many connections between Chubais and Kiriyenko that it's pointless to even recount them: the Union of Right Forces and the 2004 State Duma elections. Kiriyenko sat on the RUSNANO supervisory board, approved projects, and listened to Chubais's opinions. When things got really bad at Kompozit Holding Company (a prepreg company run by Melamed, a close associate of Chubais from his days at RAO UES and the first person arrested at RUSNANO), it was Rosatom (controlled by Kiriyenko) that bought Kompozit and saved Chubais, Melamed, and the company. In short, the attack on Kiriyenko via Chubais looks flawless, but the most important thing is that there's Sergei Kulikov, the current head of RUSNANO, who is prepared to be at the forefront of civil lawsuits. And the defense options are all very dubious.
One option is to blame the heads of RUSNANO committees, claiming they misled the members of the supervisory board. A working scheme that allows for the elimination of a couple of Chubais's associates, including Pavel Teplukhin (Troika Dialog, Deutsche Bank, and others).
According to the source, Chubais, despite all his sins and ambiguous reputation, has become a pawn in someone else's game. His enemies (and there are many) are watching his downfall with relish. Kulikov, at Vaino's instigation, has become a battering ram for the reputations of a whole host of high-profile figures, most notably Kiriyenko.
