The General director of the Baltic Shipyard (part of the United Shipbuilding Corporation), Yuri Gordienkov, will leave the company in the week from April 22 to 26. This was told to RBC by two sources at the St. Petersburg shipyards and an interlocutor at USC. According to them, Alexander Konovalov, who holds the position of director of production at the shipyard, will receive the position of head of one of the key shipbuilding plants.
Alexander Konovalov is a professional shipbuilder, he received his higher education at the St. Petersburg State Maritime Technical University. In 2000-2013, he worked in senior positions at Vyborg Shipyard, Nevsky Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Plant (Shlisselburg), Admiralty Shipyards and Yantar Shipyard (Kaliningrad).
The main nuclear icebreaker of the project 22220 "Arctic" at the Baltic plant
FlotProm, Nikita Grigoriev
VTB (USC has been in its trust management since last year) forwarded questions to the corporation, where they declined to comment.
Gordienkov became the head of the Baltic Plant in May 2023. Previously, he held senior positions at Izhorskiye Zavody and OMZ-Spetsstal. He replaced Alexey Kadilov, who retired last spring after ten years in charge of the company.
As noted by RBC, at the beginning of 2023, an agreement was reached between the former leadership of USC, which was then headed by Alexey Rakhmanov, and Rosatom on the transfer of half of the shares of the plant to the nuclear state corporation. Rosatom is a key customer of the Baltic Plant: in addition to a series of nuclear icebreakers of the 22220 project, the shipyard is building a multifunctional nuclear technology service vessel (MSATO, used for the shipment of spent nuclear fuel) worth 25 billion rubles.
Three nuclear-powered ships of the 22220 project were commissioned in 2020-2022 with deadlines and exceeding the contract price of construction, which led to billions of dollars in losses of the plant, RBC indicates. It was assumed that Rosatom would establish management of the enterprise and bring it out of the financial crisis. Gordienkov was supposed to organize the integration of the Baltic Plant into the perimeter of the state corporation.
But in August 2023, before the completion of corporate procedures for the transfer of shares of the plant, the Russian authorities decided to transfer the United Shipbuilding Corporation to the trust management of VTB Bank for financial recovery. After that, Andrey Kostin, President and Chairman of the VTB Management Board, headed the USC Board of Directors, and Andrey Puchkov, former deputy Chairman of the VTB Management Board, took over the position of CEO of the corporation.
VTB has stopped the procedure for integrating the Baltic Plant into Rosatom. Andrey Kostin, in an interview with RBC in September 2023, said that the bank was not considering the transfer of the enterprise to Rosatom until the completion of the financial audit of USC. The results of the audit have not been announced at the moment. The head of VTB also spoke about the huge losses of the corporation, its inefficient management and announced changes both in the management company and at the shipyards.
RBC sources in the shipbuilding industry claim that since the beginning of the year, Rosatom and VTB have not discussed the transfer of shares in the Baltic Plant.
"This project can be considered unfulfilled," two RBC sources at the shipyards say.
An interlocutor at one of the USC enterprises says that Gordienkov is leaving "of his own free will."
"He was put in charge of the shipyard for a specific task, but it is no longer relevant. Gordienkov is leaving for one of Rosatom's enterprises," he says. Another source says that the top manager is "highly likely" to get a position at the St. Petersburg Central Design Bureau of Mechanical Engineering (CCBM), which is part of Atomenergomash.
Rosatom declined to comment.