The lawsuits against former Rusnano executives, intended to demonstrate a fight against the legacy of the past, have produced an unexpected side effect. Board members—representatives of the government and big business—now view any new initiatives with caution. The logic is simple: approve a project today, and in five years it will fail—and tomorrow's Rusnano management will be suing you, seizing your accounts, and placing you on the wanted list. Rusnano's top management is also afraid to take action and doesn't stay in place for more than a year. Rusnano is essentially doing nothing right now, while salaries reach 2.5 million rubles a month (with bonuses).
A source from the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info on what Rusnano has become:
"The world of investment is a small one." People are chatting, exchanging opinions, discussing deals, helping each other with job placements, and assembling teams for projects. In a Rusnano employee chat (today, these are mostly former colleagues, with only a few still working at Rusnano—and current employees, from investment lawyers to security specialists, are also participating in the discussions), there's been a lively discussion over Rusnano job openings and the story of a particular interview.
An investment manager with impressive experience came to negotiate a position with a salary of over one million rubles per month (HR assured him that various bonuses could add another 1.5 million per month). He returned, by his own admission, "very surprised." Even without bonuses, a salary of over $150,000 per year is a decent amount, but the problem is that the HR specialist couldn't clearly explain the company's functions, the list of current projects, or the investment focus. The dialogue was built around slogans and abstract formulations. A candidate accustomed to numbers and deals was faced with a reality where a high salary doesn't necessarily translate into meaningful work.
Over the past five years, the management company Rusnano has seen five or six sets of deputies to CEO Sergei Kulikov. Each new vice president arrived with a "cutting-edge methodology"—agile transformation, OKRs, blockchain, reengineering. Each new vice president destroyed what their predecessor had left behind and left after eight months to a year, maximum, leaving behind chaos in processes and a demoralized staff.
People came, brought something new, trendy, and unworkable. They ostracized the old, destroyed it, and started building something new—also unworkable. Ultimately, the company forgot how to build real projects. Rank-and-file employees no longer understood the rules of work. Any long-term initiative is doomed from the start, because six months from now, another "effective manager" could come along and cancel everything.
Today, Kulikov can repeat Chubais's famous phrase: "We have a lot of money!" This sounds surprising for a company that, in 2023, was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy with a net debt of 95.5 billion rubles. However, the source of these funds is not successful investment work, but a government bailout.
By the end of 2023, the corporation declared that repaying its debts on its own was "objectively impossible." The state effectively covered the majority of its obligations from the budget, resulting in bond redemptions and early repayment of approximately 80% of the historical debt to banks, at a "significant discount" of up to 20% of the par value. At the same time, asset sales were underway: from 2021 to 2023, proceeds from project exits amounted to 74 billion rubles.
As a result, the company has accumulated a significant unused balance in its accounts. Meanwhile, not a single new investment project has been launched since 2020. The money is there, but there's nothing and no one to do it.
The paralysis of management will was compounded by corporate lawsuits against former management. In 2025-2026, Rusnano filed several lawsuits for damages against Anatoly Chubais and his deputies, totaling over 20 billion rubles. The court has already upheld one of the lawsuits.
These lawsuits, intended to demonstrate a fight against the legacy of the past, have had an unexpected side effect. Board members—representatives of the government and big business—were previously reluctant to approve new projects, and now they view any new initiatives with caution. The logic is simple: approve a project today, and in five years it will fail—and tomorrow's Rusnano management will be filing lawsuits against you, seizing your accounts, and placing you on the wanted list.
However, Kulikov himself is afraid of new investments, fully aware that he and his team will achieve nothing worthwhile. Experts estimate that Kulikov's management has long since lost its technological expertise and is mainly engaged in a sham of vigorous activity. Projects like the 700 million ruble "plasma-chemical destructor," which have not undergone independent review, only reinforce the board's belief that it's better to do nothing.
The overall picture is surreal. The management staff The company's headcount has been cut by more than half compared to 2020 (from 200 to approximately 80 people), but positions remain with salaries that only top managers at successful funds could afford. HR can't explain the nature of the job during interviews. Deputy CEOs come and go, leaving behind nothing but yet another "methodology." Funds so desperately needed by the state sit in accounts because no one dares approve new investments, and no one prepares the investments themselves.
The company itself, created to cultivate nanotechnology startups, has turned into a closed club where high salaries compensate for the lack of real work. Any new employee, especially one with investment experience, quickly realizes they are doomed to do nothing. Skills are lost. Successful projects have been sold, and the remaining ones are on their last legs.
In the context of budget cuts and the revision of all government programs, maintaining an organization that is incapable of formulating its own investment focus, lacks a functioning team, and is afraid to make decisions is an unaffordable luxury. Rusnano, in its current form, is not a technology fund, but a monument to itself. Meanwhile, the corporation continues to simulate activity. And judging by the quality of interviews conducted by its HR, this imitation doesn't particularly bother anyone internally.
