The state investment development agency went bankrupt in the Urals

The debt arose due to the purchase by the agency of debt obligations of another regional structure - JSC "YuU KZhSI". Residents will have to pay for this deal.

Alexander Dybin

The Arbitration Court of the Chelyabinsk Region has introduced a monitoring procedure in relation to ANO "Investment Promotion Agency" (AIR), established by the government of the region. Earlier, the tax inspectorate filed claims in the amount of almost 400 million rubles and blocked the agency's accounts. The AIR has existed for almost 10 years and has been supporting investment projects: consultations, assistance in obtaining land, connecting to networks, obtaining subsidies and preferential loans. At the same time, for the past few years, the structure has practically not been active and existed, for show. The agency's website has been closed for a long time, the latest news in the official group on the Vkontakte social network dates back to 2017. This happened due to the fact that a parallel structure was created in the region - the regional business support fund, which was given all the powers and all the funding on this topic. At the same time, they were in no hurry to liquidate the AIR, retaining the legal entity, as well as the minimum staff.

But how does such a structure, which, moreover, did not conduct any intelligible activity in recent years, have such a huge tax debt? The answer lies in a deal that AIR made in 2016. It was then that the tax inspectorate added about 400 million rubles of debt to the structure of the government of the Chelyabinsk region. Since 2020, the AIR has tried to dispute this debt, but has not been able to do so.

An audit by the tax inspectorate uncovered a scheme according to which 1.5 billion rubles were first transferred from the regional budget to the IDA, and then this money migrated from it to another structure - the South Ural Corporation for Housing Construction and Mortgage Joint-Stock Company (KZhSI). This legal entity also belongs to the government of the region, but due to the organizational structure, it can handle money more freely. Thus, according to the materials of the arbitration case, in 2016 the AIR received a subsidy in the amount of 1.5 billion rubles from the regional budget. Approximately one billion rubles was spent on the purchase of mortgage certificates "Silk Road" from the South Ukrainian Institute of Housing and Civil Engineering, another 400 million were spent on the purchase of mortgages from the corporation and the assignment of claims on mortgage loans. Initially, the IDA wrote off these expenses as expenses, but the tax authorities managed to prove that the agency formally acquired assets, which means that taxes must be paid for this.

Interesting in this scheme and KZhSI. The structure was created at the dawn of mortgage lending and was supposed to set an example for developers how to work with this new tool for the market. At a certain period, KZhSI was one of the largest developers in the region: it built houses itself and issued loans for them. But by 2016, it came up with a hole in the budget of one and a half billion. The authorities of the region decided not to bankrupt the structure, since a large number of unfinished objects and loans issued were tied to it, but to improve it through the issuance of mortgage certificates. True, private business refused to buy these papers and they were bought out, in fact, at the expense of the budget through the AID. In addition, KZhSI tried to challenge its own old transactions, for example, for the purchase of land plots for several hundred million rubles. After the deal, it turned out that it was not profitable to build on this land. But the company lost all the courts on this matter. Now KZhSI builds several apartment buildings a year, builds facilities for relocation from dilapidated housing and administers a fund to help equity holders.

It should be noted that the next step of the tax inspectorate will be the presentation of subsidiary liability to the founder of the AIR, the government of the region. Taxpayers will eventually have to pay for dubious financial transactions between government agencies.