Automatica Concern, part of Rostec, has been fined 62.7 million rubles for a 2262-day delay in a contract to develop the production of microchips for cryptographic information protection for the Ministry of Defense, CNews claims.
The deadline for the third stage of work (manufacturing prototypes) was set for November 2019, but, according to CNews, by the end of January 2026, the work had not been completed. NIIMA Progress and Vega Concern acted as subcontractors. There is no official confirmation of this information yet.
The contract worth 220 million rubles was concluded back in 2017. As Professor Ilya Vorotyntsev explained to CNews, such microchips already exist in Russia, but in the form of specialized developments for aviation, space and the defense industry. This is not a mass market, but products with strict requirements for reliability and safety.
NIIMA Progress, one of the subcontractors, had previously been involved in scandals with long-term delays: the Ministry of Industry and Trade demanded more than 200 million in penalties from it for disrupting the creation of an analogue of an American microchip.
In June 2023, the CEO of Automatica Concern, Andrei Motorko, was detained under an article on fraud on a particularly large scale. Together with him, the head of NIO-3 of the concern, Alexander Nesterov, was taken into custody. In August 2025, a court in Moscow sentenced Motorko to three years in prison - he pleaded guilty.
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