Translated material
Front crossing
Affected shareholders rally against each other
The shares of deceived co-investors, who have been regularly taking to the streets of Russian cities with posters for a year now, have entered a fundamentally new stage. If earlier participants in shared housing construction, who never received their apartments, held rallies against the fraud of construction companies and asked for protection from the authorities, now they are already on the streets and with posters sorting things out among themselves.The apotheosis of the struggle for the right to be considered the most affected part of the community of co-investors and, as a result, to demand increased attention to their initiatives was yesterday’s action at the walls of the Public Chamber, which volunteered to help shareholders in solving their problems. Several dozen people, divided into two groups, stood opposite each other with posters of directly opposite content and seemed to compete in the volume of shouting slogans. Judging by these slogans and posters, some shareholders supported the bill proposed by the working group of the Public Chamber led by lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, while others were clearly unhappy with this initiative.
Let us recall that the Public Chamber became embroiled in a conflict after one of the initiative groups of shareholders moved to an extreme form of protest and declared a mass hunger strike in one of the unfinished buildings on the Garden Ring in Moscow. Mr. Kucherena, who arrived at the site of the action, persuaded the co-investors to stop the hunger strike in exchange for a promise to develop a specific scheme for returning their money and property. A specially created working group proposed such a scheme in less than two months.
The draft law “On the restructuring of construction organizations” provided, according to its developers, for the involvement of a financial state agent, with the help of which the recovery and increase in the solvency of construction organizations that do not fulfill contractual obligations should occur. By financial agent, the developers mean an authorized and certainly state bank, which will either provide a loan or will participate in the completion of construction with its own money. If it is impossible to correct the situation with loans, the builders will be asked to voluntarily transfer authority over the project to the restructuring agency and the bank, so that they can decide on further actions. Then the unfinished project will be sold on a competitive basis, and the proceeds will be returned to the co-investors in cash, or living space will be purchased for them with this money.
However, literally a few days after Mr. Kucherena presented his draft document to the public, another organization of shareholders - the Association for Assistance to Injured Co-Investors - announced the registration of the all-Russian public movement “Committee for Assistance to Injured Shareholders: Housing. Earth. People". The main task of the movement, according to its leader Anton Belyakov, is the adoption of a law that prescribes a different mechanism for solving the problem. This bill, according to Mr. Belyakov, provides for the creation of a state management company, which will be provided with compensatory land plots in order to encourage investors to complete the construction of unfinished houses.
As representatives of the association, and now the Movement of Affected Shareholders, explain, they fear serious losses in the restructuring process - just as depositors of Russian banks that went bankrupt after the August 1998 crisis lost part of their money. Co-investors believe that “financial agents” can pay them with depreciated money, and shareholders insist on compensation “in kind” and agree only for square meters, but not for rubles.
A serious struggle broke out between two bills, each of which the opposing side considers “alternative”. Despite the fact that Mr. Kucherena in every possible way calls on his opponents to cooperate, Mr. Belyakov’s followers believe that “the activities of the working group at the Public Chamber are nothing more than populism and do not solve the real problems of shareholders, and the bill, developed without the participation of shareholders, does not simply does not take into account their interests, but can also aggravate the situation.”
Despite this emotional confrontation, both sides are actually advocating for the creation of a new government structure, under the control of which, over time, thousands of square meters of housing in varying degrees of readiness may appear. According to estimates from the Ministry of Regional Development, whose specialists have been assessing the scale of the crisis since the summer, there are now over 300 unfinished real estate properties in Russia. And the numbers are far from final.