“Kommersant”: “Rostekhnologii gets flak from auditors”
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has initiated more than 225 administrative procedures with regard to Rostekhnologii on charges of violating anti-monopoly legislation, the violations having been revealed during a recent audit of the State Corporation by the Prosecutor General's Office jointly with the FAS, the head of the FAS, Igor Artemyev, reported to Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin. One of the main charges against the state corporations, including Rostekhnologii, is ineffective use of government money. On Friday President Dmitry Medvedev instructed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin until March 1 to submit proposals on converting some state corporations into joint stock companies.
Kommersant has obtained materials on the audit of Rostekhnologii by FAS inspectors who had taken part in the audit jointly with the Prosecutor General's Office on the President's instructions in the summer. Igor Artemyev briefed Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin on the results of the audit in Letter N IA/4228-pr of November 2 (Kommersant has a copy of the letter). According to the letter, the service has initiated more than 225 administrative cases with regard to Rostekhnologii over violations of anti-monopoly laws and regulations, notably failure to notify the FAS of major transactions.
Artemyev cites Article 30 of the Law On Protecting Competition which envisages mandatory notification of the anti-monopoly agency of all transactions in which the total value of the buyers' and sellers' assets exceeds 400 million roubles and if the total cost of assets acquired exceeds 60 million roubles. As of June 30, Rostekhnologii had received the shares of 225 enterprises worth 138.96 billion roubles. "On the strength of the facts referred to the FAS of Russia has sent statements on violations of anti-monopoly legislation and initiation of administrative offence cases against the state corporation Rostekhnologii. The total sum of fines for the above violations may exceed 56 million roubles," the report on the FAS audit says.
The FAS has uncovered some irregularities in the way Rostekhnologii is spending government money. Thus FAS questions the rationale of the deal to acquire 100% of OOO Marketing and Investment Projects (MIP) from two people, Alexander Braverman and Leonid Klochkov, for 56 million roubles. "Rostekhnologii has departments which perform analogous functions and whose employees in accordance with the staff chart, have salaries of over 150,000 roubles a month," Igor Artemyev notes. On Friday the head of the Housing and Utilities Development Fund, Alexander Braverman, told Kommersant that he had no doubts about the transparency of the transaction.
"To begin with, marketing studies are a core activity of Rostekhnologii," Braverman argues. He said that on December 1, 2008 Rostekhnologii held a meeting at which the results of a marketing pre-audit of all the enterprises were presented. "It transpired during the meeting that more than 60% of the organisations within the state corporation do not have their own marketing strategies and 92% do not even have rules on the management of the range of products," Braverman told Kommersant. "The meeting urged the need to develop a system of marketing standards to streamline business planning and decided to acquire that asset."
According to the consolidated state register of legal entities, the owners of OOO MIP, created in 1993, were Alexander Braverman (82.78%) and Leonid Klochkov (7.22%). The company changed hands on September 29: stakes in it now belong to Rostekhnologii (25.1%) and its subsidiaries, OAO Kontsernavionika (13.45%), OOO TD AlpenStars 2002 (7.58%), OAO Metzavod Krasny Oktyabr (11.5%), OAO Korporatsia Aerokosmicheskoye Oborudovaniye (11%), OAO Korporatsia VSMPO-Avisma (10.9%) and OAO TFK Kamaz (4.45%). At the end of 2008 the company was 11.16 million roubles in the red.
Finally, the practice of holding closed tenders to award orders for the needs of Rostekhnologii came in for criticism. The FAS report says that in a number of cases the tender review commission arbitrarily changed its decisions on the tender procedure: thus during a tender review, one company changed its price offer while other participants had not been notified about such a possibility. In the opinion of the FAS in some cases "the price of the contract was unreasonably high".
The winner of the closed tender for the development and introduction of an electronic document processing system at Rostekhnologii was OOO Korus which charged 42.98 million roubles, twice as much as the price offered by the runner-up in the tender (19.58 million roubles). The procedures used by the state corporation to award orders "are not conducive to effective spending and fail to ensure transparency and publicity of the tenders," Igor Artemyev concludes.
Government agencies were not the only critics of state corporations. In his address to the Federal Assembly at the end of last week, Dmitry Medvedev said they had "no future". The state corporations which exist until project goals have been achieved (this is certainly true only of the Housing and Utilities Fund and Olympstroi) must do their job and shut down while the remaining corporations "working in the competitive market" must be converted into joint stock companies. Presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich later explained that VEB, Rosnano and Rostekhnologii could go public in 2010. On Friday the President instructed Vladimir Putin to submit proposals for their conversion into joint stock companies before March 1.
As Kommersant was told by Rostekhnologii on Friday, the latter was not prepared to comment on the FAS criticisms in detail because "it has not yet seen the audit materials." At the same time Rostekhnologii representatives said they were surprised by some of the claims: "We do not understand the essence of the FAS claims considering that anti-monopoly legislation regulates transactions and we have not effected any transactions. Government stakes were transferred to Rostekhnologii by presidential decree or government resolution." However, the managing partner of the law firm Karabayev and Partners, Sergey Karabayev, points out that under paragraph 5, part 1, Article 30 of the Law On Protecting Competition, the buyer of shares and (or) property must notify the anti-monopoly agency not only about the fact of a transaction but of "any other actions".
"This provision enables the FAS to interpret the current situation in its favour," Karabayev concludes.
Yelena Kiselyova
