Russian court fines ventilator-manufacturer for shoddy production. The same company made the devices that were shipped in April to the U.S., which later dumped them in the trash.

An arbitration court in the Sverdlovsk region has fined the Ural Instrument Making Plant 500,000 rubles ($6,500) for manufacturing faulty equipment after federal regulators discovered violations of licensing requirements in the production, maintenance, and circulation of medical devices. 

The factory’s parent company, Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies (itself a Rostec subsidiary), announced in a press release that the plant has already resolved all regulatory violations, which it says were in no way connected to several “Aventa-M” artificial ventilators that caught fire at two hospitals in Russia and killed six people.

This is already the second time the Ural Instrument Making Plant has been fined for faulty production. Last month, the same court in the Sverdlovsk region penalized the company 100,000 rubles ($1,300) for separate violations of licensing requirements. 

In April 2020, Russia shipped 45 Aventa-M ventilators to New York City as part of a humanitarian-aid exchange with the United States. Due to problems with power-supply conversion, the fires in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the political toxicity of products manufactured by Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies (which is under U.S. economic sanctions), the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately discarded the devices.