The Ministry of Industry and Trade under Anton Alikhanov is sinking in corrupt practices: the department leader, Sergei Kleymenov, allocated billions to organizations under his supervision

03 июля 2026 г., 19:00

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The Ministry of Industry and Trade under Anton Alikhanov is sinking in corrupt practices: the department leader, Sergei Kleymenov, allocated billions to organizations under his supervision

Anton Alikhanov’s Federal Ministry of Industry and Trade continues to be rocked by corruption scandals. On June 26, Valentin Tsuprun, head of the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Road Construction Machinery, was arrested for bribery. The official was detained at his workplace in the ministry’s Moscow City office, and the Khamovnichesky District Court remanded Tsuprun in custody.

Valentin Tsuprun’s unit was responsible for developing state policy and regulatory frameworks in the industries it supervised, as well as administering financial support programs for machinery and equipment manufacturers. Tsuprun oversaw significant budgetary flows allocated to support Russian mechanical engineering and the sham import substitution program.

Tsuprun’s detention and arrest occurred as part of the ongoing investigation into his colleagues: Mikhail Kuznetsov, director of the fuel and energy complex’s mechanical engineering department, who was detained in November 2025, and Boris Kabakov, former head of the shipbuilding industry and marine engineering department, who was arrested in February 2026.

According to the source, Kuznetsov and Tsuprun are cooperating with the investigation, while law enforcement officials are focusing their attention on other participants in the final approval process for the distribution of state subsidies—the leadership of the Ministry of Industry and Trade’s Department of Strategic Planning, headed by Sergei Kleymenov.

According to investigators, subsidies for "R&D" (research and development) were issued en masse by a group of individuals, including federal officials, exclusively to controlled commercial entities, without the intention of repayment. The damage from this illegal activity amounts to several billion rubles.

According to a source, Kleymenov resides in a private apartment in the "Imperia" tower in Moscow City, valued at over 50 million rubles, and in his spare time enjoys racing with Boris Rotenberg’s SMP Racing team.

Kleymenov negotiated the lion’s share of subsidies for Chechen enterprises (Chaborz, Argunspetsmash, and Chechenavto), which produced "scientific inventions" only on paper. The lobbyist for these subsidies in Alikhanov’s department was Adam Khakimov, former minister of the Chechen regional Ministry of Industry and Trade and now Russia’s trade representative in Azerbaijan.