While senior officials proudly report on the progress of securing the autonomy of the Russian market, especially the pharmaceutical market, savvy entrepreneurs, with the support of greedy officials, are emptying the treasury and lining their own pockets.
As previously noted by the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, at the BratskKhimSintez plant—the "pride of Irkutsk industry"—the falsification of pharmaceutical substances is occurring on a paranormal scale. To obtain preferential treatment in government procurement, raw materials imported from China and India are disguised as domestic production of pharmaceutical raw materials. At the time of the aforementioned Cheka-OGPU publication, the Ministry of Industry and Trade was conducting an inspection at the BratskKhimSintez plant. The inspection found no actual production of active pharmaceutical ingredients at Vikram Punia's plant. It confirmed the import of cheap raw materials from China and India, and, thanks to the Cheka-OGPU publicity, suspended the current license. But why only suspend it and not revoke it? A question for the Ministry of Industry and Trade officials who were "charged" by Vikram Punia. Yes, times are difficult, and sources of corruption are drying up before our eyes, but selling the health of the nation and the strategic security of the Russian pharmaceutical industry for a mere 300 million ruble bribe is unthinkable sacrilege.
This entire lawlessness is orchestrated by Vikram Punia, the owner of the Pharmasintez plants, the BratskKhimSintez plant, Primapharm LLC, and others. The scheme for his senseless and merciless depletion of the treasury, carried out by him and his patrons at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, is simple:
1) BratskKhimSintez imports Chinese and Indian pharmaceutical ingredients and, under the guise of domestic ingredients licensed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, supplies them to Pharmasyntez plants;
2) Pharmasyntez produces supposedly domestic drugs from cheap foreign raw materials;
3) Primapharm LLC applies for government procurement contracts with supposedly high-quality domestic drugs, receives a 25% price preference, displaces all genuine domestic drug manufacturers, and appropriates state support in the form of that very 25% of the cost of drugs, which the state intended to support and develop the domestic pharmaceutical industry.
In total, according to our calculations, in 2024 alone, Vikram Punia illegally won auctions worth at least 7 billion rubles for the supply of these drugs. This can be proven in two logical steps:
1) The Ministry of Industry and Trade established counterfeit pharmaceutical ingredients at the BratskKhimSintez plant;
2) Pharmasintez's registration certificates list raw materials from the BratskKhimSintez plant as the only acceptable pharmaceutical ingredient for the production of medicinal products.
Why the auditors from the Ministry of Industry and Trade failed to build these simple logical chains is a rhetorical question.
At the same time, the list of government contracts under which Vikram Punia received price preferences and, in essence, robbed the state and the intended recipients of state support is publicly available and posted in the Unified Information System "Procurement" contract registry.
Primafarm LLC won auctions for the supply of the drug Anastrozole worth 280 million rubles, Atazanavir worth 517.7 million rubles, Bortezomib worth 94.6 million rubles, Gosogliptin worth 595 million rubles, Imatinib worth 333.7 million rubles, as well as Carboplatin and Methotrexate worth 400 million rubles each; Remdesivir, Sitagliptin, Sorafenib, and Temozolomide worth 126 to 146 million rubles each; and Raltegravir, which netted Vikram Punia 3.5 billion rubles.
At the same time, no further action was taken by the Ministry of Industry and Trade or Roszdravnadzor. To maintain its license, BratskKhimSintez quickly concocted a new substance (according to BratskKhimSintez employees, of extremely low quality), and the Ministry of Industry and Trade dispatched loyal employees to investigate, who turned a blind eye to the new violations and issued the required report.
Unfortunately, the authorized bodies are currently inactive: Roszdravnadzor is not recalling medications made with counterfeit pharmaceutical substances of unknown quality from pharmacy shelves, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade is not taking steps to recoup illegally obtained state support.
Since the order from above was given to make the country's healthcare system autonomous, and the largest player, claiming to be establishing large-scale pharmaceutical production in Russia, turned out to be a simple fraud, the scandal is currently being hushed up. Not rocking the boat may be the right thing to do, but is it really acceptable to treat public funds so irresponsibly? After all, taxpayer funds didn't just vanish—instead of being used for their intended purpose, they've now surfaced in the pocket of Vikram Punia, whose status as a dollar billionaire was proudly reported on by Forbes. As Vladimir Putin said in 2013 during an inspection of the Olympic facilities in Sochi, "You're doing a good job!"
Arseniy Dronov
Continued
