Why are British taxpayers providing a platform in Prague for flawed research paid by the Kremlin?




From Russia with love: Anton Porjadin presents his remarkable multiplier effects at Atomex...

Anton Porjadin is no Tatiana Romanova. Far from it. He is a partner and head of the utilities practice in the Moscow office of A.T. Kearney, the global US consultancy hired by the Russian state-owned Rosatom to promote the MIR.1200 consortium (of which Rolls-Royce forms a part), apparently with the full support of Her Majesty’s government.

In a fortnight’s time, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) will stage an energy conference,
‘The Great Energy Summit’, to be opened by the British ambassador and addressed by the Czech trade & industry minister. All costs are met by the British taxpayer; participation is free. And if that is not tempting enough, there will be a presentation by A.T. Kearney as well, on the macroeconomic impacts of large energy projects on national economies. It is not yet known who from A.T. Kearney will be delivering its presentation, but most likely Anton Porjadin.

Two years ago in Prague at Atomex-Europe, just one small part of a Kremlin-backed EUR 40 billion plan to make Russia a leading global supplier of nuclear power, Porjadin presented the results of A.T. Kearney’s research into the macroeconomic impacts of erecting two new Russian reactors at the Temelin nuclear power plant in Southern Bohemia.

According to Porjadin, if the Czechs selected MIR.1200 to double the size of Temelin, their economy would enjoy a ‘stimulatory injection’ worth a mouth-watering EUR 24 billion, all thanks to what Porjadin called ‘multiplier effects’.

Porjadin picked up his economics at the Russian military technical university in Saint Petersburg, previously known as the Leningrad Mechanical Institute. His principal client is ‘a world-leading nuclear energy company’ (and I don't think he means Westinghouse). These two facts might explain his remarkable findings.

Participants at the UKTI’s ‘Great Energy Summit’ in Prague Castle on 22 October will be treated to more of A.T. Kearney’s macroeconomic insights into how Rosatom reaches parts of your national economic anatomy that other firms cannot.

The problem is that the assumptions behind the findings are never made available to the general public, so we cannot judge their quality (for readers interested in why A.T.Kearney’s study is likely to be deeply flawed, see here). We must simply take Rosatom’s word for it that this research offers a sufficiently robust reason to gouge billions out of the pockets of Czech taxpayers in subsidies.

If we knew how much A.T. Kearney was being paid to write this stuff, we could form an even better idea of the degree of its independence. In the meantime, we are expected to depend upon the wisdom of British economic diplomacy, which finds it appropriate to lend the UK government's credibility to research funded by the Kremlin.

Last month, Kirill Komarov, Rosatom's deputy director-general for international business and development, said in an interview at a conference in London that civil nuclear energy should not be politicised and subject to sanctions: "Nuclear should be out of all political discussions, all temporary disagreements, because it is a very sensitive area and first and foremost it is all about safety,"

Keeping Rosatom out of politics is going to be hard. Its supervisory board is packed with Kremlin politicians and advisers, including one, Yuri Viktorovich Ushakov, who is on the current list of sanctioned individuals because of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Ushakov was Russia’s ambassador to the US and is today an assistant to President Vladimir Putin.

Never mind that back home in London, Whitehall is reconsidering its nuclear tie-up with Rosatom: it’s business as usual in Prague. Do British diplomats think we won’t notice?