Over the 10 years of its existence, the Venture Fund of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications did not make a single investment, but increased profits

For the first time in the last four years, the Rosinfokominvest fund has become profitable. At the end of 2015, the net assets of the fund for investment reserves grew by 130 million rubles. Its CEO, Pavel Rodionov, said that the fund has not made a profit in the last four years.

In contrast to the results of 2014, with a loss of 177.6 million rubles, in 2015 the fund showed a net profit of 93 million rubles. Yield from the management of investment reserves exceeded 15% per annum, according to the general director.

The Rosinfokominvest Foundation with a volume of 1.45 billion rubles was founded in 2006 for venture investments in IT projects. Over the past 10 years since then, the fund has not made a single core investment, but placed money on bank deposits and sent them to purchase securities.

The decision to create the fund was made by the Ministry of Communications (now the Ministry of Communications), which was then led by Leonid Reiman. Now the IT direction in the Ministry of Communications is supervised by Mark Shmulevich.

Nevertheless, this year Rosinfokominvest plans to start investing in projects. He will spend about 600 million rubles on this, promises Rodionov. During 2015, the fund increased the efficiency of managing temporarily surplus funds, reduced costs for a number of items of expenditure, he says. The maximum amount that the fund is able to spend on investments is 1.3 billion rubles.

One of the requirements of the fund to projects-applicants - the presence of a co-investor. Now there are seven active projects, Rodionov says, but he doesn’t name specific companies.

Rodionov explains the delay in investments by the fact that the Ministry of Communications and the Board of Directors set the task for the fund to restart activities. Back in 2015, Rosinfokominvest studied more than 100 projects and conducted an audit of four of them. The final decision to invest in them, however, was not made, since Rosinfokominvest's experts revealed in these projects “risks that exceed the limits set by the fund,” Rodionov told Vedomosti.
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The main system problem of “Rosinfokominvest” Rodionov considers its organizational and legal form - the joint-stock investment fund ( AMF ). In the next two weeks, the fund plans to send a package of documents to the Bank of Russia on voluntary refusal of the AMF license.

The ability of the state to be an effective direct investor is generally questionable, says Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner of the Runa Capital investment fund. The state has set tough requirements for projects and decision-making procedures for Rosinfokominvest, and at some point the fund is bogged down in bureaucracy, says Alexander Chachava, Leta Capital managing partner. It’s good if the Ministry of Communications and Fund managers took these errors into account, he adds.