The Moscow city government denied on Monday that it had given up on its plans to demolish the Fantasy Island luxury settlement, Mayor Yury Luzhkov’s spokesman said Monday.
The announcement comes after Vedomosti quoted a source as saying the city had given up on the demolition. Mayor Yury Luzhkov had promised in late January to knock down the luxury housing community, whose residents include Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko and his wife, Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova.
“Sports facilities were supposed to be built here, not houses for the complicated people who now live in them. … We’ll certainly go to court, since the builders of the elite village blatantly violated the terms of the investment contract that they signed with the city and that, by the way, is not yet closed,” Luzhkov told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
City authorities said they would begin demolishing Fantasy Island once they were finished bulldozing homes in Rechnik. But last week, a City Hall meeting chaired by the first deputy mayor decided that the houses in the complex had a legal right to be there.
“The apartments built at Fantasy Island were initially registered as nonresidential space in buildings for temporary housing, which did not contradict the terms of the investment contract. Then, they were registered as residential space in buildings for temporary housing, and finally, they were registered as ordinary apartments based on documents from the city architecture committee and the Technical Inventory Bureau,” a source told RIA-Novosti.
(MT, Vedomosti)