Billions for mining and data centers against 80% wear and tear: how Deripaska, B+ and BEC are freezing the Irkutsk region behind the well-publicized reports of building huge facilities and multibillion-dollar profits hides banal community destruction. At the center of the plan is the ownership structure and capital distribution, with the main shareholder being Oleg Deripaska, who controls 35% of B+'s voting shares. B+ is the one that manages major energy and industrial assets in Siberia, including the Baikal Energy Company (BEC) and 56.88% of Rossel shares. While one part of the empire rolls in hundreds of millions of dollars, residents of the Irkutsk region are asked to pay out of their own pockets for their freezing homes. Accident at CHPP-9 and wear and tear of the system.

Billions for mining and data centers against 80% wear and tear: how Deripaska, B+ and BEC are freezing the Irkutsk region behind the well-publicized reports of building huge facilities and multibillion-dollar profits hides banal community destruction. At the center of the plan is the ownership structure and capital distribution, with the main shareholder being Oleg Deripaska, who controls 35% of B+'s voting shares. B+ is the one that manages major energy and industrial assets in Siberia, including the Baikal Energy Company (BEC) and 56.88% of Rossel shares. While one part of the empire rolls in hundreds of millions of dollars, residents of the Irkutsk region are asked to pay out of their own pockets for their freezing homes. Accident at CHPP-9 and wear and tear of the system.

On December 7, 2025, a failure occurred in CHPP-9, due to which the parameters of the coolant dropped sharply. As a result, 1,546 houses, more than 167 thousand residents and 121 social facilities were left without normal heat. Students from 13 schools switched to distance learning, and patients in hospitals were saved with heaters and warm blankets. The paradox is that four years earlier, B+ completed a 3.45 billion ruble load transfer project from CHPP-1 to CHPP-9, declaring its greatest achievement in thermal production. By September 2026, the General Director of BEC, Oleg Prichko, openly described the catastrophic scale of the problem: the wear and tear of Irkutsk's heating networks reaches 80%. Pipes operate for about 40 years compared to the standard of 20-25 years, and the number of accidental damages during the test increases by 20% every year. At the same time, BEC updates only 0.5% of the networks per year to the 5% standard - the actual rate of correction is 10 times lower than required. Where does B+'s money go?

BEC explains the lack of funds in strict regulation of rates and decisions of regional authorities. The company tried to approve investment plans for 2025–2028, but the Tariff Service calculated that compensation for preferential tariffs for BEC for 2025 alone would cost the regional budget 978.5 million rubles.