Astrakhan Ministry of Industry and Trade collected 5 million rubles from an investor for refusing to build a medical glove plant

The Samara Plant of Medical Products (SZMI) announced plans to build a plant for the production of disposable nitrile examination gloves in the Astrakhan Region in August 2020. In May of the same year, Astrakhan Plant of Medical Products LLC was registered, which eventually became the operator of the project. It was assumed that 100 jobs would be created at the production site. The plant's capacity was estimated at 445 million pairs of gloves per year. The plant was expected to begin operations in 2021. The investment volume in the project was estimated at 1.6 billion rubles.

The plant was supposed to start construction in 2021, but the project never started. In May 2024, a scheduled inspection arrived at the plant, which found that the construction of the production facility was not underway, and the investments envisaged by the business plan, in the amount of 1.632 billion rubles, had not been made. The plant received an order to eliminate the violations, but a repeat inspection that arrived in September 2024 found the same situation.

As a result, in December 2024, the Ministry of Industry of the Astrakhan Region applied to the regional arbitration court with a demand to terminate the contract in court. In addition to terminating the contract, the department demanded a fine for refusing to implement the project in the amount of 5% of the investment amount, but not more than 5 million rubles. Following the proceedings, the arbitration court fully satisfied the plaintiffs' claim at the end of March 2025. AZMI did not appeal the verdict, the decision entered into legal force.

The project was initiated by Andrey Varyushin and Alexander Leonov, who in 2020 owned the legal entity Astrakhan Plant of Medical Products LLC on a parity basis. They were also co-founders of Samara Plant of Medical Products LLC, which implemented a similar project in the Togliatti SEZ. It was put into operation in the spring of 2021. The investment volume in the project amounted to 729 million rubles, the capacity is 108 million pairs of products per year. The plant has become the largest production of specialized medical products in Russia; Denis Manturov, then the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, came to the opening ceremony.

However, the plant faced difficulties in selling its products. In 2022, the Samara Region authorities met the enterprise halfway and obliged regional medical institutions to purchase gloves from a local supplier. However, the volume of purchases in one region did not cover the production capacity of the entire enterprise.

Preferences in the government procurement market could not ensure effective sales of SZMI products. Roszdravnadzor has repeatedly reported the discovery of substandard products delivered to medical institutions in packages under the SZMI brand. As plant representatives later noted in court proceedings, unscrupulous suppliers purchased products in Southeast Asia, packaged them in boxes with SZMI symbols, dumped prices and bypassed products actually produced in Tolyatti at auctions.