Gapontsev, Treasury reach agreement on oligarch suit
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Valentin Gapontsev
IPG Photonics CEO Valentin Gapontsev and the U.S. Department of the Treasury have reached an agreement on the Russian-born and American citizen’s physicists complaint about being listed as a Russian oligarch.
In a joint status report filed late last week, both parties said they have reached an agreement in principle allowing for resolution of the case. Details of the settlement are not yet disclosed, but both sides said they anticipate disclosing the agreement within the next three weeks.
The parties had been meeting with a federal court magistrate judge since April to resolve the case that has been lingering in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. since December.
The Oxford laser technology company, through a spokesman, declined to comment until the legal process was complete.
Gapontsev, born in Russia, raised in Ukraine and a naturalized U.S. citizen, filed suit in order to have his name and company disassociated with malign acts of the Russian government. He, along with dozens of other Russians, were listed as Russian oligarchs by the U.S. Treasury in early 2018 at the behest of U.S. Congress to keep an eye on Russian influence in the U.S. and elsewhere.
At the Treasury’s own admission, the list is a copy of Forbes’ list of Russian billionaires. The magazine has since moved Gapontsev, a Worcester resident, to the American billionaires list.
In his complaint, Gapontsev said he has no ties to Russian government and his company has not benefited from any dubious actions from the country’s leadership, specifically President Vladimir Putin, whom Gapontsev said he only met once in 2011 when he received a Russian Federation National Award for his work on laser technology.
Gapontsev started the company in Russia in 1990, formed a German subsidiary in 1994 and then moved the company to Oxford in 2001.
The company had an initial public offering on NASDAQ in 2006, and revenue grew nearly every year from about $90 million in 2006 to $1.46 billion in 2018.
Gapontsev’s company and home are both in Worcester County, but IPG Photonics has a large presence in Russia via subsidiary IRE-Polus. That entity was the recipient of a $45-million investment in 2010 from a Russian government-backed technology group, but IPG repurchased those shares two years later.
Since then, the company expanded its footprint in Russia from about 100,000 square feet to more than 600,000 square feet in and around Moscow.
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