Photo: Diy13 / Istock
In April, the St. Petersburg City Court will consider an appeal by builders and several residents of an elite Moscow residential complex, from whom the Prosecutor General’s Office demands 1.3 billion rubles due to corruption schemes in the construction of houses. The nationalization of their apartments in favor of the President’s Superintendents looms on the horizon for the difficult inhabitants of the residential complex.
The Petrogradsky District Court decided that five apartment owners in a residential complex on Starovolynskaya Street in Moscow and their builders should return the damage caused to the state in 1.3 billion rubles. As the tenants’ lawyers are surprised, Judge Mazneva reviewed the case and made a decision in a record 23 days from filing the claim. The plaintiff, the Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, chose this court, although it was about Moscow cases, since two of the defendants are registered in St. Petersburg in the Petrogradsky district. There is no more binding, but this is not important from a procedural point of view.
Fontanka got acquainted with the motivated decision of Judge Mazneva and understands that the letter of the law is one thing, but its modern spirit is quite another. Having signed an investment contract with the Medical Center of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation in 2000, four construction companies attracted shareholders to build an apartment building on the site of an unfinished children’s hospital in an expensive area in a bend of the Setun River. It is within the Moscow Ring Road in the west of Moscow. To get there: you drive along the New Arbat, cross the Moskva River to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, then follow it all the way to the intersection with Rublevsky highway. And there is already a stone’s throw away.
The place is really good. Previously, there was a children’s cancer hospital, which had not been completed since Soviet times. Through the fence is the Medical Center of the Department. The unfinished building was handed over to him in 1999. In order to resettle the waiting doctors and employees of his other structures, the Superintendents decided to build housing. Having brought in the land, officials were supposed to receive 30% of about 700 apartments and 20% of commercial real estate.
Now the Prosecutor General’s Office says that the investment agreement was concluded with violations of anti-corruption legislation. He is seeking (in one of the next court cases, he has already achieved) recognition of the agreement as null and void, and all the consequences of this agreement are null and void. Here we are talking directly about the builders’ contracts with home buyers, which means that the next step is their loss of ownership of the apartments in which they have been living for 15 years, eviction and transfer of square meters to the legal owner — Managers from the point of view of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Residents told Fontanka that they noticed in their extracts from the Federal Register that the department had already ordered data on their apartments. Why this was done, they have only one version — to deprive them of their property rights and take away their housing.
This is an incredibly legally complicated story, which has been dealt with by more than one court for more than 10 years. The process of land transfer was indeed quite difficult, with a change of sides in the investment agreement. The Moscow authorities, who issued the construction permit (and eventually did), also did not do it so quickly and simply. Even more difficult then was the process of acceptance and transfer of housing, which resulted in the fact that the owners could only recognize ownership of the purchased apartments through the courts. The nearest one, the Nikulin Court of Moscow, however, has long figured out the history and rather monotonously confirmed the rights of buyers and transferred their square meters to them.
However, at some point the Prosecutor General’s Office intervened in the case. Unexpectedly for the tenants, she began to challenge the fundamental principle on which the legal position of the tenants was based — the investment agreement agreed by the Moscow authorities between the Managers and four construction companies from 2000.
In the ongoing litigation in St. Petersburg, we are talking about collecting money for apartments not from ordinary residents, but from very specific ones — those who previously worked in the Department and its structures and received apartments in them after the construction of houses. Moreover, among them are those who directly signed the investment agreement. For example, at that time, the deputy head of the Department and at the same time the head of the medical center, Sergei Mironov. His brother Nikolai Mironov was the head physician of the Clinical Hospital No. 1 of the Department. It was to her that the unfinished buildings of the children’s hospital were transferred, which in the future became the residential complex on Starovolynskaya Street. They both signed the documents that launched the investment project, both received apartments there, and both (for Nikolai Mironov — his heirs) are now at risk of giving them to the state.
At the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office, Petrograd courts are now depriving apartments and commercial premises of other high-ranking officials of the department in the early 2000s: Sergei Kovalev, Ivan Malyushin, Viktor Mikhailov.
All the defendants in the Petrogradsky district court argued that the arguments of the Prosecutor General’s Office should be ignored. There were also words about the statute of limitations, and that prosecutors refer to laws that did not exist at the time of the conclusion of the investment agreement, and about the non-involvement of specific individuals in any illegal, let alone corrupt schemes. The defendants said that the figures of damage to the state (which has also not been proven) were taken from the ceiling, the distribution of damage between them was arbitrary, and in general they hinted that, accusing someone of corruption, it would be nice to prove it first.
The Prosecutor General’s Office had something to answer to all these objections, but much more important than these details in its evidence base was the essence of the claims as a whole: instead of a children’s hospital, a residential complex was built in the middle of a protected natural complex, which was inhabited, including those who made the decision to build it. And the words that everything was done legally and, please, look, there are all permits, and legal justifications, and signatures of both Resin and Luzhkov, the Prosecutor General’s Office was not particularly offended. It was not taken into account that the court’s decision would hit not only those who actually participated in this scheme, but also ordinary buyers who invested their hard-earned money and had nothing to do with all this fuss.
A similar story happened when the Prosecutor General’s Office argued for the need to withdraw shares of KCTL JSC, a small stevedoring company in the port of St. Petersburg, which arose in 1993 on the basis of the privatized Severnaya Verf plant, in favor of the state. In 2023, the court sided with the Prosecutor General’s Office, despite the fact that for this it was necessary to declare illegal documents signed by Chubais, Koch and Gaidar that had never been canceled by anyone. As in this case, despite the fact that no one is guilty of fraud, forgery, or abuse of office, hundreds of people lose their property acquired many years ago, and without any hope of compensation.
In both cases, the Prosecutor General’s Office demands that the dishonestly obtained property be returned not in the form in which it was transferred to investors, but to those who have undergone tremendous changes for the better. In the port of St. Petersburg, on the site of empty berths and devastation over the years, a modern and working stevedoring complex has been built for tens of millions of dollars, bringing good income. In Moscow, on the site of a clean field and an abandoned unfinished building, there is an elite residential building with several buildings and 700 apartments. Neither there nor there, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the court do not assume any compensation for the invested money — since initially everything started with dishonest actions, then they themselves are to blame.
The decision of the Petrogradsky District Court, which sided with the prosecutors, is inconclusive. In the near future, it will be appealed to the St. Petersburg City Court, and the residents of the Moscow house on Starovolynskaya Street are preparing for this process very seriously, intending to participate in it massively as third parties.
It also comes to shocking antics: one of the companies that took part in the investment project on Starovolynskaya Street, LLC SU-11 “Lipetsk-M”, switched from defense to attack. Now she herself demands in the Moscow arbitration court to recognize her contract with the Managers from 2000 as invalid and apply the consequences of invalidity. To be more precise, demolish houses that have been inhabited and inhabited for almost 20 years. A preliminary hearing on the case is scheduled for April 3.
Photo: Diy13 / Istock
Источник: www.fontanka.ru
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