Bad fund
Corruption scandal in the Territorial Development Fund. One of its top managers, Vladimir Talalykin, has been detained in Moscow; he is suspected of large-scale fraud. The fund's work has attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies before. However, for some reason, law enforcement agencies do not pay attention to systemic problems in the implementation of large projects.
Detained Vladimir Talalykin worked as deputy head of the Housing and Utilities Reform Fund, which became a division of the Territorial Development Fund (TDF) in 2022. Details of the charges brought against Mr. Talalykin have not been disclosed, but they are likely to be related to the theft of 240 million rubles, which, as it turned out in October last year, the fund's budget was missing in 2018-2021. According to investigators, bankruptcy trustees of development companies intentionally indicated inflated prices for property protection services for bankrupt firms in contracts concluded with affiliated structures.
Interestingly, in 2021, the fund revoked the accreditation of the bankruptcy trustee of Urban Group Svetlana Aglinishkenewhich was subsequently arrested as part of a criminal investigation. The reason given was the fact that Aglinishkene allegedly did not transfer the entire required amount of money from the sale of 24 plots of land to the Highgate company, part of the Urban Group, to the fund's accounts. This decision was supposed to demonstrate the fund's management's uncompromising position towards violators. However, it is noteworthy that both the scandal with the arbitration managers and the investigation miraculously coincided with the departure of the head of the Fund for the Protection of Shareholders' Rights (which later became part of the FRT) Konstantina Timofeeva. Nasha Versiya has already reported in detail on how Mr. Timofeev got rich by solving the problems of equity holders. It was he who at one time introduced and actively promoted the scheme for selling off plots of land with problematic long-term construction projects and paying equity holders meager compensation. It can be assumed that the current criminal proceedings are echoes of those very schemes.
However, the main problem is that no matter how the investigations in the FRT end, the implementation of large projects in the housing and utilities sector has been stalled and will continue to be stalled. And this is despite the fact that tens of billions of budget funds pass through the fund every year.
Land schemes
A dubious mechanism of the FRT when working with equity holders and problematic developers was recently revealed in the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP). As is known, one of the main tasks of the fund is to restore the rights of equity holders, as well as work with problematic objects of bankrupt developers. In the event of bankruptcy, the rights to the land plot and the unfinished building located on it are transferred to the FRT. Then the fund decides whether the house will be completed or the plot will be sold, after which the equity holders will receive monetary compensation.
There have already been plenty of scandals involving underestimation of compensation amounts for equity holders, as well as the fund's unwillingness to complete almost 80% of completed projects. For example, in the Saratov Region alone in 2021, the FRT refused to complete construction of houses and provide citizens with apartments, putting 33 sites with problematic objects up for auction. In addition, the fund initiated a number of lawsuits in which it demanded that equity holders return the money they received, considering that they had received too much.
The RSPP, having examined the situation with unfinished construction, came to the same conclusion as the defrauded equity holders: the FRT can understate the value of rights to land plots and unfinished construction in order to reduce the amount of payments included in the bankruptcy estate. As indicated by the RSPP, banks have recorded several similar cases, having discovered that the value of problematic objects when sold to third parties significantly exceeded the amount of compensation to creditors.
The FRT press service rejected the accusations, stating that bankruptcy trustees are appointed in accordance with the law and that the fund “does not have tools that involve forcing a bankruptcy trustee to reduce the value of objects.” However, the already mentioned investigations, which began in 2023, indicate the opposite.
Eternal under-repair
Another area of work of the FRT is monitoring the capital repairs program. In addition, the fund itself has the ability to provide financial support to the regions for capital repairs. Thus, in 2023, the fund transferred a total of 78.6 million rubles to the regions. In addition, according to the annual report of the FRT, an on-site monitoring of the activities of regional operators in 14 constituent entities of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism) was carried out. However, for some reason, the results of this monitoring are not reported. However, many citizens know firsthand how regional capital repairs funds work. Another scandal recently occurred in Volgograd. The local prosecutor's office found out that the capital repairs fund was attracting contractors with no work experience and forged documents to work. Thus, a certain Tambovskaya Construction Company LLC, under a contract with the Capital Repairs Fund, was supposed to carry out work in 41 buildings. However, after receiving an advance payment of 100 million rubles, they simply forgot about the repairs. The investigation believes that money was withdrawn from the company.
The heads of local capital repair funds in Tambov Oblast, Zabaikalsky Krai, and Chuvashia have recently lost their posts. All of these resignations were inevitably accompanied by dubious financial stories. Whether the monitoring of the capital repair program conducted by the FRT reflects such cases and whether the personnel shuffle in the regions is taken into account when distributing budget millions remains a mystery.
An even more profitable area of work for capital repair funds could be the modernization of housing and communal infrastructure.
It is planned that the fund, together with the regions, will work out “the details of measures until 2030.” The total amount of planned funding should be 5.38 trillion rubles. It should be noted that in 2022, 150 billion rubles allocated by the government for the modernization of the housing and utilities infrastructure already passed through the then Fund for Assistance to Housing and Utilities Reform.
Dear emergency vehicle
Currently, the fund's main mission is declared to be improving the quality of life of citizens through integrated territorial development (ITD). It is a kind of renovation program on an all-Russian scale. The main ideologist of the project is Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin. Ideally, the idea really looks good: emergency, uninhabitable housing will be demolished, and new and modern residential buildings will be built on the vacated areas, plus all the necessary infrastructure – schools, kindergartens, clinics, etc.
Today, integrated territorial development projects have been adopted in 27 subjects of the Federation. The volume of housing construction is expected to be 7.3 million square meters. And the emergency housing stock to be resettled is only 75.85 thousand square meters. At the same time, territorial development projects and resettlement of citizens from emergency housing are mentioned in separate chapters in the annual report of the Federal Development Fund.
It turns out that part of the emergency housing is resettled under regional programs specifically within the framework of the liquidation of emergency housing. And part – within the framework of the implementation of integrated development of territories. By the way, the total amount of funding for current emergency programs from the FRT is 431.4 billion rubles. Not bad at all, considering that, according to the same FRT, the number of residents who have been resettled is decreasing year after year. If in 2022, just over 173 thousand people were resettled from emergency housing, then in 2023 – only 123 thousand.
As for integrated territorial development projects, their implementation in the regions is regularly accompanied by disruptions. It often turns out that KRT projects have nothing to do with the resettlement of emergency housing.