At Eastern Economic Forum, Putin soft-pedalled around Russian-Jewish nanotechnologist who fled to Israel
Shalom, Moshe Izrailevich: Why Putin suddenly remembered Anatoly Chubais at EEF 2023
In the photo: Anatoly Chubais
At the last Eastern Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin laughed at the attempts of the former head of Rusnano Anatoly Chubais to hide in connection with the investigation into the case of “Chubais tablets”. How and why did he mix up his tracks when fleeing Russia?
What Putin said about Chubais
The head of state admitted that Chubais’s departure from the country and his possible acquisition of Israeli citizenship may be associated with the disappearance in 2011–2014 of more than ten billion rubles allocated for the production and equipping of Russian schools with electronic tablets for textbooks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Eastern Economic Forum
It seems that in a joking tone, the head of state made it clear to Anatoly Chubais that he is well aware of his movements abroad, the possible receipt of foreign passports and even his legal status in Israel.
In terms of the story with the “Chubais tablets,” as Vladimir Putin said, there are no criminal cases, but it seems that law enforcement agencies have not yet put an end to the activities of the head of Rusnano. It is known that an audit of the former top manager of the state-owned company and his entourage for corruption was initiated last spring. At the same time, investigators checked information about Chubais’ secret foreign accounts. Perhaps the president also wanted to remind the fugitive manager of this.
Plastic Logic 100 bendable electronic textbook by Anatoly Chubais , developed by order of RusnanoHow Chubais fled Russia
Anatoly Chubais met Russia's special military operation in Ukraine in his capacity as the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation for relations with international organizations. He has held this position since December 2020 after his resignation from Rusnano. A month after the start of the SVO—March 23, 2020—Russian media published a message about Chubais’s resignation.
It is interesting that by this time the former representative was no longer in Russia: a day earlier - on March 22 - a man similar to Chubais was photographed standing in line at one of the ATMs in Istanbul. It seems that the “father of privatization” was so eager to get away from Russia that he did not spare either his positions or property.
At the end of April, information appeared that the fugitive voluntarily left the boards of directors of AFK Sistema and JSC Elektrozavod, followed by reports of an investigation that had begun against him by Russian law enforcement agencies.
Then it turned out that the former top manager was no longer going to deal with the issue of property stolen from him in 2017 in the amount of 70 million rubles. But the defendants in the high-profile criminal case then included his partners and security guards.
How Chubais hid from the president
At the beginning of last summer, in the scientific journal Voprosy Ekonomiki , a former official and former manager of a state-owned company published a research article on the non-payment crisis in Russia in the 90s as an “independent researcher from British Glasgow.” At the same time, the British The Times reported that Anatoly Chubais lives in Scotland, where he ended up as a result of a “shock move.”
A couple of months later, it became known that a reformer from the 90s was hospitalized in Italy with a rare autoimmune disease - Guillain-Barré syndrome. Life wrote that Chubais may own a villa in Tuscan Carrara several months before the incident, but representatives of the fugitive stubbornly denied this information.
While passing the time before the flight, the couple had lunch at an airport eatery
Anatoly Chubais allegedly received treatment for his illness in Germany, and already in November 2022, a photograph of Chubais and his wife Avdotya Smirnova at Tel Aviv Ben Gurion Airport appeared on social networks - from there the couple flew to Cyprus. Commenting on the pictures, lawyer Alexander Dobrovinsky said that by this time both had already received Israeli passports.
To confirm this news, in May of this year, Russian media published a photograph in which Chubais and Smirnova are sitting in the office of the alleged Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs, where they are changing their temporary passports of the country to permanent ones. At the same time, some sources indicated Chubais’ new name - in the Promised Land he allegedly became Anatoly Borukhovich Sagal . At the same time, reports appeared that he had real estate in Israel.
It is interesting that, as in the case of Italian real estate, Chubais just as persistently denied having foreign citizenship.
“ Neither the first statement, about the exchange of a temporary certificate, nor the second, about real estate in Israel, corresponds to reality,” he told one of the news agencies.
Anatoly Chubais and Avdotya Smirnova allegedly receive new passports from the Israeli Ministry of Internal AffairsSword of Damocles over Chubais
The story with tablets, the incompleteness of which Chubais was delicately reminded by Vladimir Putin during the plenary session of the EEF 2023, began in the summer of 2011, when the then head of Rusnano showed the Russian President a miracle tablet designed to replace printed educational literature in schools. 14 million children in the country were waiting for the gadget. Pilot production was expected by 2014.
The patent for the technology was held by the British company Plastic Logic, into which the Russian state corporation poured the first $ 230 million . The money was intended for the construction of a plant in Zelenograd. However, as soon as Rusnano invested, Plastic Logic abandoned conveyor production. And despite the refusal, in 2016 and 2019 the state corporation for some reason continued to invest money in it (the amounts were not specified).
Even before these additional injections, following an audit by the Accounts Chamber, State Duma deputies asked to initiate a criminal case against Anatoly Chubais due to the situation with Plastic Logic.
They found out that, under the guarantee of Rusnano, the Russian branch of the company, CJSC Plastic Logic, obtained bank loans for 5.7 billion rubles and issued them as loans at preferential interest rates to a certain affiliated structure of Plastic Logic Luxemburg. She, in turn, acquired the lender’s shares. Thus, five billion have settled in Luxembourg, and 620 million rubles are in the accounts of the Russian branch.
At the same time, the British company Plastic Logic is still functioning: in February 2022, Vladislav Filev, the owner of the air carrier S7 Airlines, suddenly acquired and transferred a large stake in the scandalous startup to his eldest daughter. After this, Plastic Logic began to go bankrupt, and now money is being actively withdrawn from there, allegedly to pay off certain debt obligations. Where the transactions are made and what the amounts are is unknown.