A billion-dollar scam disguised as "green technology": Rusnano top manager Ivan Ozhgikhin found himself at the center of an investigation into the embezzlement of budget funds

A billion-dollar scam disguised as "green technology": Rusnano top manager Ivan Ozhgikhin found himself at the center of an investigation into the embezzlement of budget funds

Today’s searches and the appearance of armed security forces in the Moskovsky Komsomolets editorial office building are in no way connected to the professional activities of the publication’s journalists.

The real target of the "masked show" was one of the subtenants of the premises - the ANO "Consortium of Medical Equipment".

The chairman of this organization’s board is the notorious Ivan Ozhgikhin, a top manager, senior managing director of the Business Development Center of RUSNANO Management Company LLC, and concurrently head of the entire environmental department of the state-owned RUSNANO Group. Law enforcement officials conducted searches as part of an investigation into the large-scale embezzlement of budget funds allocated for innovative national projects.

As it turned out, Ozhgikhin oversaw the implementation of an extremely ambitious and controversial project for the waste-free disposal of medical, biological, veterinary, and highly hazardous waste.
It was claimed that hazardous waste would be destroyed using a unique plasma system, the "Plasma-Chemical Destructor PK-200," which is supposedly capable of breaking down any toxic compounds into harmless molecules.

Despite leading Russian scientists openly calling this technology a complete scam and fiction from the very beginning, the project received powerful lobbying at the highest levels: Rosprirodnadzor head Svetlana Radionova personally organized a departmental assessment of the facility’s environmental friendliness and high efficiency, and Denis Butsaev, now a fugitive, assisted her in this effort.

Brandishing official approval from Radionova’s department, Ivan Ozhgikhin, who until recently lectured on "green technologies" for gifted children at the Sirius Science Center in Sochi, managed to secure colossal government funding for the investment project. Initially, 700 million rubles were allocated from the Russian budget for the plasma destructor, but by now, the total expenditure has exceeded one billion rubles.

Law enforcement officials determined that the money had been embezzled through a chain of shell companies, and that instead of innovative molecular decomposition, the perpetrators of the scam had planned the banal and dangerous incineration of hazardous waste under the guise of a phony government assessment from Rosprirodnadzor.