A Moscow district court has sentenced Irina Rapoport, a former top manager of the state nanotechnology corporation Rosnano, to 15 years in a general-regime penal colony in absentia, alongside a fine of 300 million roubles and the confiscation of 85 million roubles in assets. The Presnensky District Court also upheld a civil claim by Rosnano, ordering Rapoport to pay 1.676 billion roubles in damages. She was convicted of large-scale embezzlement and commercial bribery.

The prosecution argued that between 2012 and 2015, Rapoport and three co-defendants — former Rosnano deputy chairman Oleg Kiselyov, head of subsidiary Nanoenergo Fund Limited Oleg Dyachenko, and ex-chairman of Bank Peresvet Alexander Shvets — siphoned funds from the corporation through controlled firms. According to the investigation, they arranged loan and surety agreements with Bank Peresvet, then diverted the money using fictitious contracts. Rapoport’s defence, led by lawyer Svetlana Vorontsova, maintains her innocence and asserts that the case rests on false testimony from Dyachenko, who struck a plea bargain with investigators and was sentenced to three years in prison in February 2025.

The sentencing is the latest episode in a protracted legal reckoning at Rosnano, which has faced mounting financial scrutiny. In 2021, the Moscow Exchange suspended trading in the corporation’s bonds amid uncertainty over its obligations, and by autumn 2022 the Russian government was discussing the possibility of dissolving the entity to halt further budget support. Former Rosnano head Anatoly Chubais, who led the corporation from 2008 until his resignation in December 2020 and left Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, described the criminal prosecutions of his former colleagues as “repression” and “a mockery of the law” in a May 2026 statement. Rosnano has filed multiple civil suits against Chubais and other ex-managers, seeking to recover losses from projects including the Plastic Logic flexible tablet and the Crocus MRAM memory venture. In April, an arbitration court in Moscow partially granted a claim for 5.6 billion roubles in the Plastic Logic case, and enforcement proceedings to seize Chubais’s assets have been initiated.

Viewed from Moscow, the Rapoport case forms part of a broader pattern of high-value embezzlement prosecutions targeting former executives of state-linked entities, legal observers note. The Russian Investigative Committee has proposed adding embezzlement and fraud to the list of crimes punishable by confiscation of property. The dossier remains active: Rosnano’s civil claims against Chubais and other former managers continue to be heard in arbitration courts, while the criminal investigation into the alleged theft of $50 million from the corporation, opened in October 2022, is ongoing, though Chubais has not been publicly named as a suspect.