Less than two months after the arrest of Baring Vostok founder Michael Calvey and just days after that of former minister and investor Mikhail Abyzov, another high-profile Russian businessman with a relation to the tech business was sent to jail on March 26 in pre-trial detention.
(In what looks like an epidemics, several other high profile businessmen and officials were arrested lately, or rumored to be exposed to arrests, but EWDN covers only cases related to the technology or venture industries.)
Vsevolod Opanasenko, director general and founder of the Russian supercomputer company T-Platforms, is facing 10 years of jail for abuse of office. As part of the same case, Aleksandr Aleksandrov, chief communications division of the Interior Ministry’s IT communications and information protection department, has also been detained for “misusing office with grave consequences.”
Neither Opanasenko nor Aleksandrov have pleaded guilty. The details of the case have not been disclosed publicly.
As noted by the Russian media, a commercial dispute occurred in 2016-2018 between T-Platforms and the Interior Ministry in relation to a computer supply contract. According to another theory, the matter is related to T-Platforms’ contract with the state-owned Solnechnogorsk Instrument Plant on the development of a computer-aided design center. This plant is a branch of Rostec, the state-owned military tech giant.
T-Platforms is very well known on the Russian supercomputer market. In 2015, it received the CNews Award for its international expansion. The company had inked a contract with German Jülich Supercomputing Center to supply V-class Cluster modules for the JURECA modular supercomputer.
From supercomputers to nuclear threat?
T-Platforms owns 75% of the stock in Baikal Electronics, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based systems on a chip (SoC) that develops Russian Baikal microprocessors. Meanwhile, the state-controlled financial institution VEB.RF (better known as VEB or Vnesheconombank) owns a 25% stake in T-Platforms, following an investment in the company in 2011.
T-Platforms and its subsidiaries in Germany and Taiwan were subject to a brief period of sanctions in 2013. In March of that year, the US government saw in T-Platforms a nuclear threat: the company was added to a list of entities that were “acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States” by having involvement with nuclear research and development of supercomputers for military purposes. Specifically, T-Platforms’ operations in Russia, Germany, and Taiwan were added to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) Entity List by representatives of the US Departments of Commerce, State, Defense, and Energy.
The business and image seriously affected T-Platforms, which was forced to suspend purchases of components, materials, and semiconductors. On December 31, 2013, however, T-Platforms and its subsidiaries were removed from the Entity List following its appeal and a great deal of communications between Russian and US government officials.
