The Moscow Arbitration Court may move the high-profile proceedings in the lawsuit filed by ROSNANO seeking to recover 11.9 billion rubles from the corporation’s former executives, including Anatoly Chubais, into a closed hearing. The state corporation itself has requested this.

The formal basis cited is the presence of commercial secrets in the case materials. However, according to media sources, the real reason for such a decision lies in the personal composition of the Board of Directors that approved the disputed investment project.

This body included individuals holding key positions in public administration: Elvira Nabiullina, Sergey Chemezov, Andrey Fursenko, Sergey Kiriyenko, Mikhail Kovalchuk, and Anatoly Chubais himself. Discussion of this fact during open court hearings could create an undesirable backdrop.

At the center of the proceedings is the project “MRAM: Creation of magnetoresistive random-access memory production in Russia,” implemented from 2011 to 2020. The new management of ROSNANO believes that the decisions made at that time were unreasonable and resulted in multi-billion losses.

According to the case materials, the project passed a multi-stage approval system: it received positive conclusions from the Scientific and Technical Council (including members of the Russian Academy of Sciences), committees under the Board of Directors, the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation, and most importantly, final approval by the Board of Directors of ROSNANO JSC on April 19, 2011, whose membership at that time included the individuals mentioned above.

Thus, the project that is now declared unprofitable had been approved at the highest level.