Complaints of the Chinese uncle

Residents of Siberia are increasingly treating the leaders of the People’s Republic of China: they ask for order to restore in Chinese companies that work in Siberia "with gross violations of the law, security requirements, and pose a threat to ecology, people's lives." The authors of appeals claim that they write to the leaders of a stranger state from hopelessness, because the Russian authorities are inactive and do not even try to solve the accumulated problems.

Poisoning by a million

This fall, the historian and blogger Boris Dylyavtsev wrote an appeal to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping with a request to figure out the work of the Lunsin plant in Tuva. The company, which belongs to the Chinese corporation, was recognized in 2017 as the most dysfunctional in terms of ecology among all mining companies operating in Russia. The supervisory authorities to Lunzin had before, but the plant in Tuva both worked and works. In the activities of the enterprise, all new violations are identified , but in fact it does not change anything. This forced the Psylyavtsev to turn to the Chinese leadership: if in Russia they cannot deal with the plant, let the owner of the enterprise restore order, the author of circulation believes.

The Mining and Processing Plant "Lunsin" is open in the Tuzhinsky district of Tuva in the summer of 2015. The Chinese company Zijin Mining Group in 2006 won a license to master the Kyzyl-Tashtyg Polymetals deposit in the competition, which was organized by the Federal Agency of Rosneedra, the construction of the enterprise soon began. The project invested 16.8 billion rubles. In the materials of the Tuvan administration of another federal agency - Rosprirodnadzor - "Lunsin" is first mentioned as a "malicious violator" (as experts in the report call companies at which neither instructions nor fines) still at the construction stage, in 2014. The company was convicted of repeated violation of environmental legislation under several points: excess of harmful emissions into the atmosphere, pollution of water bodies, violation of the requirements for the treatment of subsoil.

The worst environmental company works in the protected area, violations of the law on its part are documented, and local authorities do nothing in this regard

Four months after the launch of the plant, Rosprirodnadzor checked the work of Lunsin at the request of local residents. Results - 12 administrative cases and a fine of 720 thousand rubles for pollution of water and soil. This year, in the rating of the environmental responsibility of the World Wildlife Fund, the UN Development Program, the Global Ecological Fund and the Ministry of Natural Resources, Lunsin took the last, 33rd place among all enterprises of its profile.

- This plant operates in Togge, which is commonly called Pearl of Tuva. In addition, nature for Tuvans is a special value. As for the Russians, a sense of justice, perhaps, says Boris Dylyavtsev. - And the worst environmental plan, the enterprise works in the protected area, violations of the law on its part are documented, and local authorities do nothing in this regard.

In the All-Russian environmental rating, Tuva takes 62nd place, and this is that, in addition to "Lunzin", "large" industry in the republic, consider, there is no remaining. At the same time, Tuva does not receive anything from this Chinese project. Tax deductions from all GOKs in the region make up no more than 5% of the republican budget, the environmental payments of Lunsin - 3 million rubles a year. When the project started, there was an agreement that 80% of jobs at the plant would be given to local residents. But now there are no more than a third of the Tuvans among workers, the rest are Chinese citizens.

The Government of the Republic of Tuva The Siberia.real project confirmed: the initially agreed ratio of the number of employees - citizens of Russia and China - is now really not maintained at the plant. As for environmental violations by the enterprise, the republican government here, as we were told, have no authority at all.

- I immediately want to say about the rating of the Wildlife Fund. We studied it and came to the conclusion that its results demonstrate not compliance or non -compliance with environmental requirements, but information openness of enterprises on environmental issues ( in reality this is not so, what can be seen by the link . - RS ). As for the environmental assessment of the plant’s activities, we do not have such powers, ” Elena Kudimova , Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology of the Republic of Tuva, told Siberia. Realii. - The company conducts prey at a federal property deposit. Therefore, only federal structures can lead any control of its activities, including environmental. For example, the Office of Rosprirodnadzor in Tuva. We can only offer to conduct a particular check. That there are problems, we do not hide. There are no enterprises that would not have a negative impact on the environment at all. According to Kumymova, recently a meeting was held at the ministry, to which representatives of Rosprirodnadzor and Lunzin were invited. Rosprirodnadzor listed claims to the enterprise, and Lunsin agreed: yes, there are violations.

“Well, for example, representatives of the plant admitted that they did not have time with the launch of treatment facilities,” says the deputy minister. - Those that are now at the plant, as it turned out, do not give the desired effect. Now they decide there which structures are better to buy, who will install them. They promised to solve everything until the end of October. We agreed that the experts of the ministry would take part in re -checking at the enterprise along with experts of Rosprirodnadzor and that there will be no obstacles to this for us.

I note: about the obstacles - the statement is not accidental. A commission has already come to the plant, which included experts at the scientific institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences to evaluate the environmental measures of the plant. Experts were not allowed to the territory of the enterprise.

Local authorities are silent. More precisely, periodically expresses about the significance of the project for the region. But what this significance consists is incomprehensible. The benefit is obvious only to the Chinese side

At the end of September, Rosprirodnadzor once again fined Lunsin for 468 thousand rubles for soil pollution with heavy metals and 247 thousand for pollution of water bodies with wastewater. The audit that revealed these violations took place in July. The plant was easier to pay than to put the treatment facilities. I repeat: the construction and equipment of the plant, which began to work only 2 years ago, cost almost 17 billion rubles. Obviously, there was no high -quality treatment equipment in this amount.

The audit that is now taking place at the plant began after the appeal of public activists and publications that Lunsin pollutes the Ak-Hem, O-Hem and Big Yenisei River.

- Fines are fines, for Lunzin with its profits they are penny. But let's not forget the main thing: Yenisei originates in Tuva and flows north through all of Siberia, ”says Boris Dylyavtsev. - And if there are no cleaning systems at the plant, it threatens residents of not only Tuva, but also other regions. It turns out that for ecological payments of 3 million rubles a year, "Lunsin" considers itself the right to poison hundreds of thousands of people. Moreover, everything seems to have nothing to do with it: neither the Chinese authorities, nor Russian, nor republican. Local authorities are silent. More precisely, periodically expresses about the significance of the project for the region. But what this significance consists is incomprehensible. The benefit is obvious only to the Chinese side.

Fires are a matter of time

In the summer, residents of Kansk, district center in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, simultaneously turned to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping. At that moment, the trouble has already happened in this city: in the territory of semi-legally working Chinese enterprises in May 2017, a large fire occurred (waste-sawdust that had been there for years), which destroyed 78 houses in Kansk and left about 300 citizens without housing. Two people died.

"The emergence of new fires is a matter of time" - this is how, in the fall of 2017, in contact with Kansk head, Nadezhda Kachan was written by the deputy of the City Council Vladimir Makarov. The deputy indicates that the problem of disposal of waste from sawmills, legal and semi -legal, which in Kansk is more than a hundred, has not yet been resolved. “Fires were a matter of time” - my interlocutors said about this in the spring of this year, when I knew the reasons for the Kansky fire.

As the deputy of the City Council Evgeny Ivanov said then, Kansk did not catch fire in May - he actually has been ongoing continuously for the past five years. In a city with a population of just more than 100 thousand people, 110 small sawmills, legal and not very. Most of them belong to foreign entrepreneurs. Foresters are regularly caught on various kinds of violations, primarily related to ignoring the fire requirements, fine, issue instructions and prohibitions on work, but everything continues as it was.

Since 2014, Kansk cannot be equipped with a special landfill for waste disposal, although money was allocated from the regional budget for this - 270 million rubles. The city administration in the spring of 2017 already ordered the court to engage in the landfill. These works did not begin then, and in May in Kansk strong fires occurred one after another.

Several criminal cases have been instituted at once. In relation to the head of the department of supervisory activities of the Ministry of Emergencies in Kansk, Alexander Peshkov, for a bribe of 200 thousand rubles from the entrepreneur. The remuneration was awarded to the Emchees to ensure that he "closed his eyes" to the waste in the territory of the enterprise. The trial of a criminal case initiated against Ilya Bukhonkin, the head of the Kansk customs, began in court: he, according to investigators, “minimized customs control” in relation to wagons with lumber -goals going abroad.

And finally, the head of Kansk Nadezhda Kachan was held accountable at once in two criminal cases of negligence.

"Being a significant number of landfill waste from the city of Kansk, reliably aware of the location in the northwestern promotion in the northwestern promotion, Nadezhda Kachan showed negligence and did not take measures to ensure the necessary amount of financing for the proper municipal land control, did not submit a plan for the prevention of the possible consequences of the ignition to the Kansky City Council, I ignored several decisions of the city court and the instructions of supervisory authorities related to the liquidation of landfills, ”the investigative committee said in a statement.

The total damage from two spring fires in Kansk, May 7 in the production areas and the 24th in the residential area, is estimated at 72.5 million rubles. "Everything that happened became possible due to the unscrupulous and careless attitude of the suspect to the performance of their official duties," the investigation is emphasized.

But now, a few months later, nothing has changed in Kansk.

“In June, we conducted rallies, demanding the resignation of Hope Kachan in connection with the loss of trust and the initiation of criminal cases in her regard,” says Evgeny Ivanov. “She is still at her post.” And the things, although they were initiated, we do not see the results. Everything remains as it was. Foresters work. Only, maybe some of them were renamed. All the same people are in power.

Waste of sawmills in Kansk is still not disposed of. The townspeople are ready for new fires.

- You see, the question here is not so much in whether these enterprises work legal or not. The main thing is how the city authorities react to violations on their part, what they are doing to cope with the situation, ”says Vladimir Makarov , deputy of the Kansky City Council. - It is clear that if millions of cubic meters of forest are drunk in the city, the waste will inevitably be. The businessmen themselves, if they are not forced to take them, will not take the sawdust: it is a little expensive, and there is nowhere to put them more. This is where officials should show themselves. But they do not show. In the official city newspaper Kansky Vedomosti, information was published that, they say, a plan for the elimination of unauthorized landfills has been agreed. I am in one department of the city hall, in another: "Show me this plan, I am a deputy of the City Council." They can’t, discourage. That is, the question hangs again in the air.

Makarov adds: waste could not be “buried” or burned at the training ground, but put them into business, for processing.

“But we are still far from that.” We have no sawdust and can really bury. And fire pierces in Kansk are still not equipped, water from water pipelines and is taken in case of something. And here, after all, here and there it will blame. Therefore, I wrote to the chapter that new fires have a matter of time. And I received an unsubscription: they say, the issue of waste processing is not considered now. And about how they are disposed of in Kansk, not a word.

We asked two questions to specialists of the Kansk administration, which, it seems, provide for simple and unambiguous answers. First - are those enterprises that the fire began in May this year work now? The second - did the equipment began in Kansk a landfill for the disposal of sawmill waste?

They could not answer any of these questions in the city administration.

Construction in law

There is a tourist boom in Baikal. But this is not everyone who pleases.

“On the island of Olkhon, conflicts between Chinese businessmen and local residents are taking place every now and then,” says Natalya Tumureeva , a member of the Buryat regional association in Baikal. - In general, from the "Irkutsk" side of Lake Baikal is a serious problem: people often complain, they say, we become the province of someone else's state. How, on what basis do foreign citizens rent land in the Russian region? You can understand foreigners - they want to get their benefits. Question: Why do our officials allow them to do this?

Local authorities urge to develop tourism. But what the tourist boom will turn out for Lake Baikal, no one calculated, experts say now.

- And now the mass Chinese tourist went to Baikal. There are no treatment facilities at their many tourist facilities, the waste from them merges directly to the lake, ”says Alexander Kolotov , a member of the Angaro-Baikal Basin Council. - At the same time, neither local residents nor the economy of the region have practically nothing from such an influx of tourists. After all, the Chinese tourist business is quite specific: tourists, coming to Russia, live in Chinese hotels, darke out in Chinese institutions, use the services of Chinese guides and are boiled by souvenirs in Chinese stores.

It turns out that here a foreign business receives advantages to the detriment of local residents. But, as the head of Khuzhir, the administrative center of Olkhon, Vera Malanova, in most of these cases, from the point of view of the law, notes. Unless to change the laws themselves.

“And here everyone is being built here, almost through the courtyard,” says Vera Malanova . - According to the law, it is not forbidden to do this, including foreign citizens. Our business is in the deadlines allotted by law to issue a building permit. Nobody will ban the property from local people to buy foreigners, there would be documents in order. And when the construction is underway, we cannot say - a person or a residential building is building a camp site. Then the finished object can be re -registered from the residential to non -residential, the land under it can be translated into another category. And you can not translate. After all, its own house is not forbidden to lease tourists. For this, individual entrepreneurs do not need to be registered, income would be declared. And no one has the right to force a person to live in this house constantly. There are many cases when real estate is in Russia, and he himself, for example, in the USA. Everything is fine.

Vera Sergeevna says: at one time due to confusion with the transfer of Baikal water protection zone, construction was suspended. But not for long.

- We consulted on this issue. We were told: in settlements you can build without restrictions. And in fact, but where else to build people, not in a clean field. And what they are erecting there - they are already their own business. Today it is his residential building, tomorrow the hotel, the day after tomorrow the warehouse, and then he will demolish this building at all. All according to the law.

At the same time, Malanova herself (she emphasizes: as a local resident, and not as an official), she agrees: over the past five years, the ecology on Olkhona has not definitely become better. Recently, water for laboratory tests was selected here, the results were disappointing. And the reason for this is exactly the very development of tourism for which local authorities were so advanced.

- I don’t know how it would be possible to reduce this very anthropogenic load, which so much is said now, and how to prevent the further pollution of Baikal. Может быть, регулировать ситуацию выдачей платных разрешений на остановку в палаточных городках: скажем, на сезон их выдана тысяча, если лимит исчерпан – всего доброго, до следующего лета. Или вот есть у нас организация, которая вывозит отходы. Услуги ее стоят довольно дорого: везти-то далеко приходится, на пароме, полигон есть только на материке. Может быть, стоило бы еще плату за вывоз поднять? Expensive? Ну тогда стройте гостиницы и отдыхайте в других местах.

А вот очистные сооружения, на нехватку которых все жалуются, замечает Маланова, как раз могут добавить проблем. Сейчас по закону, рассказывает она, сливать жидкие отходы на грунт нельзя, можно только в водоем, на глубину. А единственный водоем на острове – это озеро Байкал. Хорошо ли будут работать эти очистные сооружения? Обеспечат ли такую чистоту воды, чтобы на выходе она соответствовала байкальской? И не приведет ли их массовая установка к строительству новых гостевых домов и еще большему наплыву туристов? Сейчас отходы вывозить дорого, и это все-таки ограничивает размах, с которым действуют владельцы гостевых домов, а с очистными сооружениями для хозяев гостиниц все будет обходиться в копейки.

– Вообще, честно сказать, я бы как-то переориентировала людей в том, что касается отдыха на Байкале. Не торопилась бы агитировать за массовый байкальский туризм в привычном понимании. Это не то озеро, на которое стоит приезжать, чтобы позагорать и искупаться, для этого есть множество других прекрасных мест, с оборудованными пляжами, инфраструктурой, "заточенной" под такого вида отдых. У нас этого нет, да и не должно быть: на Байкал надо любоваться, фотографировать его, медитировать… И конечно, его ценность – уникальная, чистейшая вода. Вы ведь не пьете воду из ванны, в которой только что вымылись. Местные в Байкал почти и не заходят – они все о нем понимают. Если озеро стало грязным, то это только из-за приезжих, – говорит Вера Маланова.

И добавляет: только сейчас, впервые за всю историю Ольхона, специалисты Института географии имени Сочавы СО РАН получили госзаказ на изучение антропогенной нагрузки на остров. Первые результаты исследования будут готовы к концу этого года, тогда станет более-менее ясно, насколько серьезна ситуация и как ее регулировать. Но такое исследование – исключительный случай для Байкала.

Посмотришь на российское законодательство – вроде все хорошо. Но что-то все время не работает

– Оценка последствий туристического бума не проводилась ни на государственном, ни на региональном уровне, специальных исследований нет, – говорит Наталья Тумуреева. – В Бурятии создано министерство культуры и туризма, которое призвано заниматься этой проблемой. Но оно озабочено наращиванием туристического потока, в том числе из-за рубежа, привлечением инвесторов – как российских, так и иностранных. Но прежде чем считать возможные прибыли, стоило бы посчитать и ущерб для природы, и стоимость тех мер, которые нужны для его предотвращения.

Почему до сих пор не проводится такая работа? Наталья Тумуреева считает: надзорных органов много, но свою работу они в полной мере не делают.

– Посмотришь на российское законодательство – вроде все хорошо. Но что-то все время не работает, – говорит Тумуреева. – Надзорные органы со стоящими перед ними задачами не справляются. Дело, наверное, в безалаберности: все сидят на своих местах, получают зарплаты, все довольны. Людей, которые действительно болеют за свое дело, очень мало. Вот и получается: там просмотрели, тут упустили, здесь недоделали, на это махнули рукой, не подумали о последствиях. Проблемы можно решить, если начать их решать. Если же дожидаться непонятно чего – дело с мертвой точки не сдвинется и за сто лет.

И сказанное относится не только к ситуации в Прибайкалье.