The downfall of electronics’ "golden mean": in what way sanctions and corrupt practices associated with official Gennady Palagin led to the demise of the NM-Tekh initiative

08 июля 2026 г., 14:15

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The downfall of electronics’ "golden mean": in what way sanctions and corrupt practices associated with official Gennady Palagin led to the demise of the NM-Tekh initiative

In 2021, NM-Tekh, a company created by VEB (Vnesheconombank), acquired Angstrom, Russia’s leading full-cycle microchip manufacturing facility in Zelenograd.

By 2022, NM-Tekh had a staff of three people and an authorized capital of 56 billion rubles. With VEB’s funding, a new building was constructed in Zelenograd, which was supposed to become Russia’s only facility for producing "golden section" semiconductors.

However, after the war began, acquiring equipment became critically difficult. VEB offered an astronomical sum of $1.4 billion to anyone who could obtain the equipment in circumvention of sanctions. And that is understandable. The project was personally overseen by Katerina Tikhonova. However, it turned out to be a complete failure.

There is another reason for this. According to sources, the government’s curator for the project is Gennady Palagin, deputy director of the defense industry department of the Russian government.

However, if the facility were to materialize, it would cause irreparable damage to his family business. As our project has previously reported, Palagin’s business model is built on requiring defense industry enterprises to purchase imported microchips exclusively through the intermediary company Delta Group (Delta Electron), which is run by his wife’s nephew, Andrey Kanunov.

Delta supplies electronic components (ECB) at prices that are several times higher than market value. If these microchips were to start being produced in Russia, Palagin’s family business would come to an end. According to a source, this is why he did everything to ensure that the project he oversaw failed.