The Moscow city government has given up on its planned demolition of the Fantasy Island luxury settlement, located not far from Rechnik, a source in City Hall told Vedomosti.
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 documentation from the city architecture committee and the Technical Inventory Bureau," a source told RIA-Novosti.
The process means that the settlement's residents received all of their ownership documentation legally.
Construction of Fantasy Island, located on the banks of the Moscow Canal in the western district of Krylatskoye, began in 2000. It has 24 cottages and 19 four-story buildings. But according to Moscow city government Order No. 525, the area was supposed to be used for a water-skiing complex.
"I bought property in this village on the secondary market in 2007. The property is listed in my income declaration, which, by the way, was printed in the press. All of the rights to it were registered correctly and within the time frames established under the law," Khristenko told Vedomosti through a spokesperson. He declared a 218.6 square meter apartment.
The decision to leave Fantasy Island alone is no surprise, said Vitaly Mozharovsky, a partner at Goltsblat BLP. "Apparently the folks living in that settlement differ significantly from the residents at Rechnik," he said.