St. Petersburg has its own Rublevka – this is a resort area on the shore of the Gulf of Finland with expensive real estate, which not everyone can afford to purchase.
Especially for those who do not have enough money to live in an elite area, there is a city dacha enterprise “Prigorodnoye”: since Soviet times, it has been servicing more than 2 thousand modest houses in resort villages and helping beneficiaries rent them. But if you have the necessary connections, then you can buy it – and for next to nothing.
So, for example, I did wife of the vice-governor of St. Petersburg Maxim Meiksin Tatyana. In 2017, she through Prigorodnoye rented two houses for 15 yearsalthough, according to the rules of a dacha enterprise, renting is possible for no more than a year.
In March 2020, the city put these houses up for auction with a minimum price of 7.5 million rubles. No one except Tatyana Meiksina laid claim to the houses — they were sold together with an “encumbrance” in the form of a 15-year lease.
In 2020, Meiksina for pennies – about 12 thousand rubles – privatized plots of houses with a total area of 33 acres, and sold them a year later – judging by the advertisement, the official’s wife asked 41 million rubles. The profit, according to the most conservative estimates, could be at least 30 million.
And there are hundreds of such cases. The city could lose about two billion rubles on gray schemes, and St. Petersburg officials, their relatives and partners regularly turned out to be happy buyers.
Read more about the corruption scheme involving the sale of luxury housing in St. Petersburg in a joint investigation by the Dossier Center, Novaya Gazeta and the Chronicles anti-corruption project.
https://dossier.center/dacha/ (with VPN)
Elite plots of land near St. Petersburg have been sold for next to nothing for decades; the buyers are officials and public sector employees.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
