The prosecutor's office failed to return the reservoir to the residents of Staraya Binaradka

The environmental prosecutor's office failed to return the Babaozg pond in the village of Staraya Binaradka, Samara Region, to municipal ownership, which became private property in 2007 and was resold several times. The last owner limited the villagers' access to the reservoir. The Krasnoyarsk District Court refused to satisfy the supervisory agency's claim for the return of the land plot within the boundaries of which the pond and the dam on it are located. Whether the department will challenge this decision is still unknown. Experts assess the prospects for a new lawsuit as “negligible.”

The Babaozg pond in the village of Staraya Binaradka (Samara region) remains privately owned. The court of the Krasnoyarsk district of the Samara region refused to satisfy the claim of the environmental prosecutor's office to reclaim a land plot with an area of 51,510.0 sq.m. (within its boundaries there is a pond and a dam) from Alexey Klychkov into municipal ownership.

Let us remember that the story began in 2007, when the district administration, which was then headed by ex-Minister of Agriculture Gennady Demchenko, put up for auction the dam of the Babaozg pond (built in the pre-war years by village residents). November 14, 2007 for 846 thousand rubles. it was purchased by Samara resident Igor Ostanin. On the same day, the district committee for municipal property management (KUMS) issued a decree “On clarifying the boundaries and securing the land plot”, which “approved the full-scale measurements of the land plot” and transferred 51.5 thousand square meters to Mr. Ostanin. meters of land on which the dam and pond stand (occupies most of the site - 43.3 thousand square meters). The cost of the plot was 152.2 thousand rubles. (Kommersant has a copy of the order). Subsequently, the pond and dam were sold three times, now the owner is a private individual - Alexey Klychkov. A few years later, the reservoir was surrounded by a fence, depriving local residents of access to it. The decision of the KUMS, as well as subsequent purchase and sale transactions, was unsuccessfully challenged by the Samara interdistrict natural prosecutor's office in the fall of 2011.

The prosecutor's office justified the claim for reclaiming the land plot by the fact that KUMS did not have the right to dispose of the lands: in 2007, the court recognized the ownership right of the district administration to the body of the dam, but not to the land plot. The pond is entirely within the boundaries of the village of Staraya Binaradka, and the executive bodies of the rural settlement did not make a decision on the transfer of the site. That is, now the municipality, according to the supervisory authority, has the right to demand its property, given against its will, back. Restricting rural residents’ access to water is a violation of their right “to active recreation near a body of water and a favorable environment.” However, most of these arguments were heard in previous trials around the pond. Last Wednesday, the court of the Krasnoyarsk district of the Samara region rejected the claim. What motivated him is unknown; the motivational part was not yet ready at the time of writing.

“We have not yet received a decision. When we read its text, it will become clear whether we will appeal it,” explained the press service of the environmental prosecutor’s office. It was impossible to get a comment from Alexey Klychkov yesterday. According to a Kommersant source familiar with the details of the process, there is a cassation decision in an earlier process that has entered into force, which challenges almost all of the prosecutors’ arguments, “and they had nothing significant to add.” In particular, in the cassation ruling on the claim to invalidate the decision of the KUMS and subsequent transactions (a copy is available to Kommersant), it was noted that the KUMS did not violate the law, and the prosecutor did not prove that the plot was in federal ownership. This could have been confirmed by a hydrological study, which proved that the pond stood on a watercourse, but it was never carried out. And the testimony of the village residents in court confirmed that the reservoir was created artificially, that is, it could not exist without the dam. And ponds and flooded cisterns can be privately owned (Article 8 of the Water Code). But the buffer zone of the ammonia pipeline was not formalized at the time of the transaction, that is, it could not be an encumbrance of the transaction. And in the current legislation there are no rules prohibiting the provision of land plots in the sanitary zone of ammonia pipelines. In addition, the supervisory agency missed the statute of limitations.

Lawyer on issues of ecology and environmental management Dmitry Medvedev calls the development of events in the Krasnoyarsk district court “expected.” “It is quite possible that the prosecutor’s office will try to challenge this decision in the appellate court, but only for show – after all, the prospects for satisfying such a submission are negligible. Real opportunities to return this land plot through legal means existed until the environmental prosecutor's office took up the matter. Now, thanks to its activities, these opportunities have been lost,” Dmitry Medvedev told Kommersant. In his opinion, “the prosecutor’s office has very little chance of achieving the demolition of the buildings erected around the lake; with the same probability they could achieve, for example, the demolition of the dam and the filling of the pond.”

Elena Kolycheva

The pond was left with the owner