An update on British diplomatic efforts to promote Rosatom's bid to build more nuclear reactors in the Czech Republic.


Red carpet treatment

A couple of weeks ago, I alerted readers to the support being given by British diplomats in Prague to Rosatom’s bid to build more nuclear reactors in the Czech Republic. I pointed out that British policy in this area is dictated largely by the business plan of Rosatom’s partner, Rolls-Royce.

One small but concrete example of this diplomatic support is the UKTI’s “GREAT Energy Summit”, staged a fortnight ago in Prague. The summit is the nuclear lobby’s equivalent of a ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting, with various evangelists from across the English Channel bearing the Good News, what the UKTI calls ‘the resurgence in civil nuclear power across Central Europe’ -and what should be called "Russia's nuclear renaissance".

One of the more prominent evangelists present was actually from across the Alps, but never mind. Laurent Ponthieu, president of Rolls-Royce Civil Nuclear SAS based in Grenoble, was enthusiastically singing the praises of Kremlin-owned Skoda JS to the assembled British businessmen hoping to join Rolls-Rosatom’s crusade to build lots and lots of Russian nuclear reactors in Central & Eastern Europe.

Rolls-Royce's potential market in the region is enormous. There are some 60 Soviet-era reactors that would benefit from its services. Russia claims that by 2030 it will have built 38 new reactors at home and 28 abroad.

To help Rolls-Royce capture a share of the market being created by Russia, it appointed in mid-2013 the Czech political veteran and former senior Communist, Vladimir Dlouhy, to its international advisory board to lobby regional governments on its behalf. Like the great majority of Czech political and business leaders, Rolls-Royce's new advisor is an outspoken critic of EU sanctions against Russia. Dlouhy was recently elected president of the Czech economic chamber and is being groomed to become the country's third pro-Russian head of state.

The UKTI event also offered a platform to the consulting firm AT Kearney to present its findings into the macroeconomic benefits to the Czech economy of paying the MIR1200 consortium to build two more reactors at Temelin. This research, funded by Rosatom and conducted by Anton Porjadin of A.T. Kearney’s St Petersburg office, has never been made available for either public or peer review.

Porjadin learnt his economics at the Russian military technical university in Saint Petersburg, previously known as the Leningrad Mechanical Institute, and his principal client is ‘a world-leading nuclear energy company’ (and I don't think he means Westinghouse). These two facts alone explain his remarkable conclusions that, were the Czechs to select MIR1200 to double the size of Temelin, their economy would enjoy a ‘stimulatory injection’ worth EUR 24 billion, all thanks to what Porjadin calls ‘multiplier effects’.

Instead of Porjadin, AT Kearney sent their senior partner in Prague, Igor Hulak (pictured above shaking hands with the host) to the GREAT Energy Summit to promote Rosatom's 'multiplier effects'.

Hulak’s Russian affiliations are not as obvious as his colleague from St Petersburg: he only spent four years working for a Russian oligarch. Hulak worked for a subsidiary of NVision Group, one of Russia’s largest IT businesses owned by Vladimir Evtushenkov, now under house arrest after falling out with Putin over his support of the ‘wrong’ Donbas rebels, according to Novaya Gazeta, the Russian opposition newspaper. In 2008, Hulak was hired by Marek Dospiva of Penta to run Aero Vodochody, from where he joined AT Kearney.

Rolls-Royce is a British company. AT Kearney is a US company. And both are playing their part in a Kremlin-funded plan to make Rosatom a leading global supplier of nuclear power (for more details, see this piece entitled 'Russia's New Empire: Nuclear Power' from the Pulitzer Centre).

Who can blame them? Whereas state-owned Rosatom's primary task is to help Russia to acquire influence abroad, private companies like Rolls-Royce and AT Kearney must actually make money. And the best way to do that is to join Rosatom in building Russia's resurgent civil nuclear empire.