Date
Author
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
Let's go through the forest
Dmitry Medvedev decided to save the Khimki forest. Officials doubt that he will succeed.
The fact that "United Russia" need to intervene in the scandal around the Khimki Forest, the party leadership found out on Thursday morning. The first deputy head of the presidential administration, Vladislav Surkov, who was on sick leave, called and ordered to help the president, who decided to intervene. The party, says a party functionary, immediately issued a press release demanding an immediate halt to deforestation. They were immediately pulled up—too radically. This press release was withdrawn and replaced with a softer one: United Russia called on the president to discuss the exciting topic. Until that morning, says a source in the party, it never occurred to anyone to "beat this topic away from the opposition."
On Tuesday, Medvedev's meeting with Bono did not bring up the topic of the Khimki forest at all, according to presidential press secretary Natalia Timakova. When asked by Newsweek what was the last straw, she replied that the president had been following this topic for a long time, how it was discussed in blogs, what kind of public outcry it caused.
However, Dmitry Medvedev decided to make a 180-degree turn after the U2 concert in Moscow—all Newsweek sources agree on this. At the concert, Bono called Yuri Shevchuk onto the stage and, as it were, sided with the defenders of the forest. Medvedev could not but intervene, otherwise his meeting with the U2 leader would have looked like pointless posturing, says a source close to the presidential administration.
For most officials, the president's impromptu came as a surprise. A source in the presidential administration assures that they did not prepare for such a scenario; on the contrary, they developed plans for how to repel informational attacks by environmentalists. The Ministry of Transport, for example, according to its employee, has been negotiating with PR agencies in recent weeks and looking for potential counter-propaganda contractors.
Newsweek's interlocutors in the government assure that it is very difficult to legally formalize the will of the president - all contracts have already been concluded and there is no document that would explain the delay in cutting. They also predict penalties for stopping work.
At the same time, officials doubt that the change of course is the final decision, because the president ordered not to change the route, but only to hold public hearings. A source familiar with the details of the project says that the track is one of the favorite brainchild of Prime Minister Putin, so this project will definitely not be buried.
"The president didn't say 'give up the construction,'" government spokesman Dmitry Peskov tells Newsweek. "He instructed to discuss it again. If repeated hearings show the unacceptability of the construction, it will have to be abandoned. If the hearings confirm the previous conclusions, the construction will be restored.”
Pause construction
Last Wednesday, the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Vladislav Surkov, was away from work all day. The day before, he had a meeting with United Russia activists, says a Kremlin source, Surkov was very angry with the party members and was nervous. The topic of the Khimki forest was not raised at the meeting at all, only intra-party squabbles. And then Surkov fell ill and did not go to work.
And already on Thursday morning, according to one of the Kremlin officials, Medvedev called Surkov and said that the president's interference in the Khimki case had to be somehow framed. It was decided that it was out of hand to answer the opposition directly to the president, so he should be invited to a dialogue by the party in power.
United Russia issued an appeal. A couple of hours later, an entry appeared in the president's video blog on this topic, as well as an instruction to the head of the Kremlin administration, Sergei Naryshkin, to suspend construction. A little later, a similar instruction was sent to Prime Minister Putin. Government spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Newsweek that the president's decision was agreed with Vladimir Putin. Putin himself on Friday in Khabarovsk promised that he would carry out the president's order, however, he complained that environmentalists often protect someone's economic interests.
However, with whose economic interests the project of the Moscow-St. Petersburg toll highway is connected, it is still not completely clear. This project has been discussed since 2004. Only the appointed Minister of Transport, Igor Levitin, then stated that this piece of the highway was planned to be put into operation by 2012. The road will be fully open to traffic by 2020.
Competition and Minister
It was assumed that the project would be implemented partly at the expense of budget funds, partly at the expense of investors. Their investments will be recouped both by collecting tolls and by using the surrounding areas. In principle, the concessionaire was also identified: the Lider company, controlled by Yuri Kovalchuk, the owner of Rossiya Bank and an old acquaintance of Prime Minister Putin, claimed this role. The Leader company manages Gazprom's pension fund and has the opportunity to invest in a 30-year project.
Everything changed in 2006. Minister of Transport Igor Levitin came to France and offered the management of Vinci to join a competing consortium, which also claims to participate in the construction and management of the Moscow-Petersburg toll highway. Vinci is one of the world's largest road construction firms. However, she decided to participate in the consortium not alone, but together with the N-trans company. This company is known to the general public under its previous name, Severstaltrans, where Minister Levitin worked before joining the civil service. However, after becoming a minister, Levitin announced the sale of his stake in Severstaltrans - with the income from that transaction, he is one of the richest ministers in Russia.
In September of the following 2007, the Ministry of Transport announced a competition for financing, construction and operation on a paid basis of a section of 15–58 kilometers. Two bids were submitted for the competition, one from the North-West Concession Company (a consortium of Vinci and N-Trans), the second from LLC Stolichny Trakt (a consortium of Leader and Gazprombank). Applicants had to offer the best price for a road trip and the smallest amount of funds they needed from the Investment Fund. SZKK offered cheaper travel, but asked for more budget money, Trakt, on the contrary: travel was a little more expensive, but there were fewer budget funds. At the end of 2008, the competition commission disqualified Trakt's application on formal grounds, and SZKK won due to the lack of competitors.
consortium for two
The ownership structure of SZKK is also still unclear, although until recently the consortium appeared in the Russian press and in the statements of Russian officials exclusively as a French company. There was no mention of Russian N-Trans participation at all, although Vinci's 2008 annual report explicitly states that the company is implementing the Moscow-Petersburg route project with a Russian partner. NWCC Vice President Vincent Cabanne told Newsweek that the consortium was set up by Vinci and N-Trans on a parity basis. That is, the secret Russian beneficiaries of N-Trans can count on half the contract amount.
Last week, the Vedomosti newspaper found out that one of the members of the board of directors of SZKK is Georgy Koryashkin, CEO of NPV Engineering, representing the interests of Arkady Rotenberg, vice president of the Russian Judo Federation, owner of Stroygazmontazh and a longtime friend of Vladimir Putin. The N-Trans company told Newsweek that Koryashkin is an independent director, and Rotenberg's structures do not have shares in the company. However, the presence of independent directors in non-public companies is an unprecedented rarity for Russia; usually members of the board of directors are representatives of the shareholder. A Newsweek source familiar with the history of the project confirmed that Arkady Rotenberg has a longstanding interest in the highway project.
However, Vinci's 2009 annual report contains a strange wording, it says that the French in the NWCC do not have a "partner", but "partners" - in the plural. However, Vincent Cabanne assured Newsweek that the number of participants in the consortium did not expand.
All routes
The main gift for the winner of the competition was the chosen route. It allowed without any problems to earn a lot of money on the use of adjacent territories. And from the point of view of development, the route through the Khimki forest looked just perfect.
Option number one—building a highway through Khimki—was too expensive, requiring the relocation of 28,000 families. From a humanitarian point of view, this would probably be just right, says Mikhail Blinkin, scientific director of the Research Institute of Transport and Roads: today all these people live, in fact, on the side of the federal highway, loaded 24 hours a day. “This is a very long and complicated work—it can take more than one year to get approvals and resettlement,” says Blackwood Managing Partner Konstantin Kovalev.
For similar reasons, the second option was also rejected - the construction of a highway through the Molzhaninovsky district, where numerous contradictions with legal entities would have to be settled. The Inteko company had interests there, which acquired the right to build two plots of 76.5 and 148.6 hectares in 2004, paying $ 5 million for this. However, even Inteko could not start construction there due to the fact that “Third parties had rights to the land”, and this issue was never resolved. In addition, Blinkin clarifies, the territories of the Molzhaninovsky district had the status of a specially protected natural zone. In the summer of 2009, Inteko abandoned its development.
Finally, the Khimki forest—the third, main route of the route passes through it—did not have such a status. The authorities of the Moscow region, long before the start of the construction of the highway, approved a plan for the development of the territory of Khimki, in which they intended to build up the territory of the forest. Saved status has been removed from it. “The advantage of this option is that there are practically no agreements with the owners of the land,” says Kovalev. “Here, the owner of the forest is the state, that is, no one.” In all other options, it is necessary to seize land from individuals, from commercial organizations that own shopping centers.
Blinkin recalls that, in addition to these three, there were other options that did not make it to the final discussion: "They were much further north, but were less attractive for investment."
According to the norms in force at that time, the concessionaire received the right to develop a territory 3 km wide adjacent to the highway. The length of the track passing through the forest is 20 km. The road builder was given a gigantic area (most of the forest) that could take years, if not decades, to develop, says Blackwood's Kovalev. According to the development plan for the city of Khimki, by 2020 its population should have tripled, and the area of the housing stock should have increased by more than 6 million square meters. m. All this increase could be covered by the territory adjacent to the highway. All experts admit that this route construction option was both more convenient and more profitable for NWCC. “According to one of the alternative options, only one or two shopping centers can be built. In another way, a little more,” says Sergey Sergievich, general director of the construction company Leader Development.
In 2009, the cost of the project increased to 66 billion rubles, and in order to close the hole in the budget, it was decided to involve European financial institutions, in particular the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). This bank is sensitive to environmental issues and never takes part in "dirty" projects. At the same time, the width of the right-of-way was reduced by a decree of the government of the Moscow Region from 3 km to 100 m. This was, of course, very bad news for the consortium—by complying with European standards, they were losing potential profits. However, to date, the EBRD has not yet given a final answer on participation in the project: the project has not yet passed the environmental impact assessment.
Penalties ahead
A source close to the government apparatus told Newsweek that government officials are now almost in a panic: “We are scratching our heads for the second day: how to legally and without violating the terms of the contract to suspend work.” According to the source, if a decision is made to lay the route again, Russia will have to pay fines to SZKK for terminating the state contract, and they can reach 6 billion rubles. This means that the current environmental scandal can be very beneficial for contractors.
At the moment, the official assures, the legal hole is not filled with anything. Unless the Ministry of Transport spoke with the contractor and asked to leave the construction site for a week or two. Most likely, this is how long the public hearings will last. At least, according to Dmitry Peskov, this will be a very short time, since "we are talking about an international consortium with the participation of the French." A source in the Ministry of Transport in a conversation with Newsweek predicted that significant changes in the route of the route will increase the time frame for the project by one and a half to two years.
However, a Newsweek source close to the presidential administration does not believe that the route will change. He argues like this: “There was a certain social problem. She had no clear reaction. She was designed. But that doesn't mean the decision will be reconsidered." And on Friday evening, information appeared that the administration of the city of Khimki was forcing residents to sign a petition for the continuation of the construction of the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway along the previous route.
Sofia Samokhina, Elena Chernenko and Elena Mukhametshina contributed to the preparation of the article