The company owned by Arkady Rotenberg that built Russia's Crimean Bridge says it didn't make a profit on the project

Arkady Rotenberg’s “Mostotrest” construction company will likely earn no profits for building the bridge that connects Russia to Crimea, company head Vladimir Vlasov told Forbes magazine. Vlasov says “Stroygazmontazh” — another company Rotenberg owned until recently — will also net zero profit for its role in building the Crimean Bridge. “It will be good if [...] Stroygazmontazh stays out of the red,” he explained.

Mikhail Ganelin, a senior analyst at the firm “Aton,” told Forbes that the bridge was constructed too quickly to be profitable. Given the speed of the project’s implementation, Ganelin says, “a null result is actually a good result, since there could have been serious losses.”

Stroygazmontazh was named the Crimean Bridge project’s general contractor in January 2015. The project’s total costs were at least 223 billion rubles ($3.5 billion). Mostotrest was hired as a subcontractor for 97 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) to build the bridge’s support pillars and railway spans.

Arkady Rotenberg previously said that President Putin personally asked him to help build the Crimea Bridge. Shortly after his company was hired for the construction job, in an interview with the newspaper Kommersant, the billionaire said he looked at the project as “a contribution to the country’s development,” and didn’t think of it as a money-making endeavor.

In November, Stroygazmontazh changed owners. According to the website RBC, Rotenberg sold the company to a Gazprom subsidiary for 75 billion rubles (almost $1.2 billion).