Translated material
Chamber of Promises
Dissatisfied shareholders suspended their hunger strike
The deceived co-investors did not wait for a response from the government, but they enlisted support from legislators. On Wednesday, the State Duma adopted an appeal to the head of government, Mikhail Fradkov, calling on him to take a number of measures to protect the interests of participants in shared-equity construction. The deputies did not just abstractly stand up for shareholders, but asked the executive branch to allocate apartments to co-investors in “social housing facilities in federal ownership,” and also to develop a mechanism for settling the debt of unscrupulous developers to citizens. The State Duma proposes to recommend that regional government bodies and local governments “pay off the debts of unscrupulous developers to citizens - participants in shared construction at the expense of budget funds.” In addition, deputies propose to develop measures of financial and tax incentives for the activities of construction companies that have accepted the obligations of unscrupulous developers.The very next day, Deputy Minister of Regional Development Yuri Tartyshov came up with ideas on how to return people’s apartments or money. He proposed creating a state enterprise to manage the assets of the notorious Social Initiative company, whose shareholders have been holding a hunger strike of protest for the second week. True, Mr. Tartyshov admitted that “such an apparently simple idea runs into a number of legal difficulties.” He asked a member of the Public Chamber, lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, to bypass them, who also expressed a desire to join the fight for the rights of defrauded co-investors.
So far, however, Mr. Kucherena has only managed to convince the starving shareholders of the Social Initiative to suspend the hunger strike. Negotiations with hunger strikers, he said, “were difficult.” “People have their own civic position, and, naturally, they wanted to receive some guarantees that the issues would be resolved. People believed us and stopped the hunger strike. We promised that we would actively address the problems,” said Kucheren’s lawyer, who promised that “concrete decisions will be made within one and a half to two months,” he said, although he still called this period “preliminary.”
The defrauded shareholders themselves admit that they are ready to grasp at any straw just to get the square meters they paid for long ago. And the promises of officials and representatives of the OP are treated with a grain of salt. “We’ll see how these two commissions will work - under the Ministry of Regional Development and in the Public Chamber,” said Anastasia Antonycheva, press secretary of the organizing committee of the affected co-investors, in an interview with a Vremya Novostei correspondent. “Now the main thing is the implementation of decisions,” Victoria Penkova, a board member of the coordinating council of the deceived co-investors of the Social Initiative, supported her. “If they are not implemented, then the wave of protest will rise with renewed vigor.”
The State Duma’s proposals themselves seem very reasonable to shareholders. “Ways to solve the problem have been prescribed, and now it is up to the government how to implement them,” Ms. Penkova told Vremya Novostey. — The idea of a state-owned enterprise that will take us all and all the obligations to us, fulfill them, and then deal with the companies seems optimal to us. Now it remains to clarify how this fits into existing legislation. However, on the one hand, deputies are ready to make amendments, and on the other hand, if this option cannot be implemented, there are others.”
According to Victoria Penkova, the State Duma’s appeal concerns not only the co-investors of the Social Initiative, but generally all shareholders. “Our company is called more often than others simply because we have the most victims - 20 thousand, and because the threat of bankruptcy hangs over us,” she explained.