Reputational costs

The story of how the deputy director of the Luga branch of the Cadastral Chamber of the Leningrad Region, Galina Shadanova, and her relatives at a bargain price received plots on the banks of the Luga River in a recreational area, was continued.

In the article “ Cadastral Family ” we told how residents of Shalovo (a suburb of Luga) tried to convince the prosecutor’s office to challenge the illegal allocation of plots to an official. The prosecutor's office agreed to challenge in court only the registration of ownership of the plots. The very fact of the formation of individual housing construction on public territory has never been disputed.

The head of Shalovo, Irina Meshaeva, paid dearly for her activity: unknown people set fire to her courtyard buildings, and only a miracle saved the apartment building and the owners themselves from destruction. The police did not find the arsonists, but they opened a criminal case against Meshaeva herself, since Shadanova accused her of inciting the theft of property.

Some time later we received a letter from the Cadastral Chamber. A representative of the department demanded to publish a refutation, since, in his opinion, the article published false information that cast a shadow on the reputation of the employees of the Cadastral Chamber.

According to the chamber, Shadanova did not use her official position, since she and her relatives received three plots of 15 acres each “on a general basis” before Shadanova came to work at the Cadastral Chamber. We rummaged through the documents and found that the authors of the claim consider Shadanova’s request to provide her with land as the fact of “receipt of plots on a general basis.” At the same time, the leadership of the Luga district also provided plots to her son and mother-in-law, although a family in need of living space would probably be happy with just one plot. But it is important that this happened several months after Shadanova took office and suspicions of abuse of her official position remain. She could have written the application even ten years before these events, but only after becoming a cadastral official did she immediately receive three plots in the most prestigious place in Luga.

Residents campaigned against the illegal distribution of plots right on these plots

In addition, the management of the Cadastral Chamber was confident that everything was done according to the law, since the plots belong to “land of settlements.” We had to explain to officials that there is zoning within settlements. In the only valid urban planning document for Shalovo – the “Sketch Development Plan” of 1992 – this territory is classified as public land. And the argument that “ almost all of Shalovo was not built according to the 1992 project and, in fact, the project is not being followed ,” particularly touched us. Many laws are not observed in our country, but this cannot be a basis for prohibiting the publication of information about these violations in the media!

We were accused of illustrating the article with photographs of the wrong areas. Objections fell away when it became clear that representatives of the city and district administration of Luga spoke at the 2012 people's meeting right at these very sites.

But most importantly, the representative of the chamber stubbornly insisted that the two ladies - Shadanova and Meshaeva - had a personal vendetta based on mutual hostility, which arose due to the fact that the latter “ herself would like to own or lease these plots.”

According to the documents, it is a public recreational area. In fact - private plots

We were not too lazy to call Shadanova asking when and why she quarreled with Meshaeva. Galina Viktorovna was surprised and said that she had never personally known Meshaeva, had no “hostile relationship” with her, and in general the PR specialist misunderstood her.

The only complaint that remains hanging heavily on us is that in her justification to the management, “Galina Shadanova claimed that she or her relatives did not try to sell the plots, did not hire intermediaries, did not place advertisements. (...) Even if someone claimed to be selling the above-mentioned plots, this is not evidence of Shadanova’s guilt.”

Here we have to agree: someone here and there can sometimes sell other people’s land. And this really may have nothing to do with our heroine. Moreover, activists in 2011 did not think to preserve the advertisements that were hung in Shalovo. What if they saved it? It is not at all necessary that the owner of the phone number printed in the ad would remember that he once acted as an intermediary in the sale of land. And the fact that we have witnesses who called on these very advertisements is unlikely to satisfy the chamber. Therefore, we will restore “the image of the Cadastral Chamber and its employees” and assume that Shadanova did not try to sell her plots.

It turns out that everything else - the allocation of three plots to the official’s family in a public area and their fantastically low redemption price - does not damage the reputation of the Cadastral Chamber and its employees.

In our opinion, the chamber has a very selective attitude to assessing its reputation. For example, we recently published information that V. A. Sadikova, an employee of the Vsevolozhsk branch of the Cadastral Chamber of the Leningrad Region, issued a cadastral passport for an individual residential building for a barn, which is actually a temporary structure ( see “New” dated March 11, 2013 ). She did this in favor of the raiders, who are thus trying to seize the municipal shore of Lake Tea in Toksovo. We accused the official of serious malfeasance. There was no reaction from the Cadastral Chamber. Do such actions damage the image of the organization?

P.​ S.​ We apologize for the error in determining the relationship of G.V. Shadanova and L.K. Razlivalova. The plot on the bank of the Luga River in public territory, next to the plots of G.V. Shadanova and her son M.S. Shadanov, was received not by the mother , but by the mother-in-law of the main character . This is an important clarification.