Progress is evident: Roscosmos financial violations declined to 30 billion rubles

Victoria Pavlova

Of course, 30 billion rubles is an impressive amount. For comparison: investments in the construction of an oncology center in Krasnodar (the largest in the Southern Federal District) are estimated at 20 billion rubles. And here they are just violations of one state corporation in one year. But at the end of 2018, the violations revealed by Roscosmos were estimated at 50 billion rubles, and at the end of 2017, at a record 760 billion rubles. Last year, at the height of the pandemic, no such information was released.

Violations, of course, do not mean outright theft, but a host of other factors: improper accounting, misuse of funds, violation of funding standards... However, at the end of 2017, 43.6% of the total volume of violations also occurred in the field of accounting. and 32% - for the formation and execution of budgets. However, this did not prevent the opening of criminal cases on the fact of theft. As it turns out, neat wording can sometimes hide sawing and corruption. Moreover, the frauds were revealed at the highest level with the participation of the head structure and TsNIIMash. And after that Dmitry Rogozin promised "a radical strengthening of discipline both in the corporation itself and in all organizations subordinate to it". We would be happy to note if it actually worked out. But objective facts do not allow to give free rein to optimism.

It is very likely that not Rogozin, but covid and the pandemic made a much more significant contribution to reducing violations in the state corporation: Roscosmos had to postpone many projects last year and postpone them to 2021. By the way, it is noteworthy that it is the pandemic that the head of the state corporation explains such weak indicators for space launches - only 15 for the whole year (which, by the way, is more than 2 times less than what the United States or China did). Last year, the launch of the Science module to the ISS was postponed, the Russian-European Martian mission "ExoMars" was postponed, and the number of employees at Baikonur was minimized.

This was reflected in financial reporting: last year Roskosmos was among the worst executors of budget allocations. That is, the state corporation simply could not spend all the allocated money. 43.2 billion rubles, or 17.9% of the funds allocated by the budget, remained unused. In 2018, on the contrary, the allocated funds were not enough and the plans had to be revised by 14% to 145.6 billion rubles. And then 17 space launches were made.

A direct pattern emerges: more launches require more active work and funding, which entails all kinds of violations. A pandemic has come - many work has been curtailed, funding has stopped, the volume of violations has decreased. At the end of 2021, we can also expect good (by the standards of Roscosmos) indicators on the legality of the use and accounting of funds. But not because of new covid restrictions, but because the Ministry of Finance cut budget allocations to Rogozin's estate by 20 billion rubles.

Of course, there is nothing good about cutting back on funding for the space industry, no matter how well the funds are spent. But, if, for example, in the United States, funding cuts (the US Senate Appropriations Committee cut NASA's budget for the lunar program by $ 2.2 billion) is compensated by the fact that there is a self-earning SpaceX, then everything rests on the budget - Roscosmos itself in completed only 4 commercial or partially commercial launches last year.