Translated material
An island of luck
An elite village in Moskvoretsky Park can avoid the fate of “Rechnik”
The destructive fuse of Moscow officials, who this year resolutely set out to clear the territory of the capital from unauthorized construction, will apparently bypass the elite village of Fantasy Island, which until recently was predicted to have the sad fate of the Rechnik gardening partnership. Yesterday, RIA Novosti, citing a source in the city administration, reported that the Moscow mayor's office will not initiate legal proceedings regarding the legality of the construction of elite townhouses that appeared in the early 2000s in a specially protected natural area near Moskvoretsky Park. It is noteworthy that none of the officials of the city hall personally decided to confirm the refusal of claims against the “islanders,” or to admit that even federal ministers were among the inhabitants of the village.Let us remind you that Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov himself put the mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov on the waiting list for the eviction of residents and the demolition of Fantasy Island. In the midst of work to dismantle the less respectable holiday village "Rechnik", the mayor announced that neighboring elite residential buildings were also erected on an area not intended for this purpose. “Sports facilities should have been built here, not houses for those difficult people who now live in them. We will definitely go to court,” said the mayor. According to him, “the builders grossly violated the terms of the investment contract,” and “Fantasy Island” will face the same fate as “Rechnik.”
But, according to RIA Novosti, last week at a meeting with Mr. Resin, the Moscow Committee for Architecture and the prefect of the Western Administrative District of the capital “managed to prove that the cottages in “Fantasy Island” have a legal right to exist.”
The apartments in this elite village, as the mayor’s office explains, were first “registered as non-residential premises in temporary residence buildings, which did not contradict the terms of the investment contracts.” Later, after approvals from the Moscow Committee for Architecture and BTI, the living space in the village received official status. Now city builders claim that for the construction of a rehabilitation complex for the disabled and a hotel and health complex, the same developer was allocated a land plot adjacent to the village with an area of 15 thousand square meters. m and it is this area that will be cleared of illegally erected buildings.
As previously reported, on the site of the elite village, in accordance with the decision of the Moscow mayor's office (city government decree No. 525 of July 4, 2000), a water-skiing sports complex was to appear. Two areas were allocated for the base of the children's and youth sports school - 9.63 and 21.9 hectares. And according to the investment contract concluded in 2003 by the mayor's office with the Investment World "Fantasy World", a rehabilitation complex for the disabled and a hotel and health complex were to be built here.
As the leader of the Yabloko party, Sergei Mitrokhin, told Vremya Novostey, the capital’s opposition is outraged that no one is touching “Fantasy Island.” “In an elite village, built in a natural area as a kind of annex to a children’s sports school, which they never got around to building, there are an order of magnitude more violations than in Rechnik,” Mr. Mitrokhin complains about the inequality of owners of different social strata compared to the existing in the city by law.
The mayor of the capital has not yet responded to the anonymous statements of his subordinates. But, as the mayor's press secretary Sergei Tsoi told reporters yesterday, this issue was not discussed either in the Moscow government or in any of its structural divisions. In the city's construction complex, the Vremya Novostei correspondent was assured that the final decision regarding the Fantasy Island village had not yet been made. The fact of the meeting with Vladimir Resin on the village was also not confirmed there, noting, however, that the head of the construction complex “does not make such decisions alone.”
It is noteworthy that the mayor is expected not only to make a decision on Fantasy Island, but also to answer the question in general to what extent the authorities are ready to allow investors and builders to develop the territories of Moscow’s natural complex. This week in the Moscow City Duma the discussion of amendments to the law “On Specially Protected Natural Areas in the City of Moscow” proposed by the Department of Natural Resources Management and Environmental Protection should be completed. The document, under the pretext of the need to reconstruct sports facilities, essentially allows construction in specially protected natural areas. In particular, the text of the amendment does not stipulate that we are talking exclusively about sports facilities, and not about housing construction, for example. And the capital’s deputies drew attention to this, warning that the updated law could be interpreted too broadly. Officials stated that this was a technical error, and before the final reading they withdrew the document in order to obtain the mayor's opinion. On Wednesday, the document will be considered by deputies taking into account Mr. Luzhkov's visa.