City Hall on Thursday denied reports that a Chinese trade complex would be built to replace Cherkizovsky Market, saying any such center will be located beyond the Moscow Ring Road.
Vladimir Malyshkov, head of Moscow’s consumer markets department, said Wednesday that the city was ready to provide space for Chinese investors who would construct a building complex for Chinese traders who have been displaced from Cherkizovsky. The market has been closed since June 29 over sanitary and safety violations.
City Hall has chosen two possible spots for a trading complex away from residential areas, Malyshkov said.
A spokeswoman for City Hall declined to say where these spots, sized 140 and 60 hectares, are located, while an official statement Thursday said any such complex would lie outside the Moscow Ring Road.
“The Moscow government has not considered any other alternatives of such a project,” the statement said.
One possible location for Chinese merchants could be a new building located on the southeastern fringe of Moscow, where construction has been almost finished, said Sergei Sanakoyev, head of the Russian-Chinese Center for Trade and Economic Partnership.
There have been about 500 requests from Chinese companies who are interested in becoming tenants, but half of them were immediately rejected because they didn’t have proper documentation, Sanakoyev said.
A spokeswoman for developer AFI Development, Natalya Ivanova, confirmed that the company has an office complex in the Kosino area of Moscow that could be turned into a shopping complex but denied that specific plans exist. “We have received such a request, but it’s too early to talk about a Chinese trade center. The official decision has not been made,” she said.
Sanakoyev said any possible facility would not be a replacement of Cherkizovsky, where many sellers operated illegally. “A civilized trade center would bring serious Chinese exporters to Russia, who were previously unable to compete with cheap counterfeits,” he said.
Goods worth about $2 billion were confiscated from the market, while media reports have said 60,000 to 80,000 Chinese lost their jobs because of the Cherkizovsky’s closure.
The closure prompted a Chinese delegation, led by Chinese Deputy Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng, to fly to Moscow last week and request that the city do more to accommodate the out-of-work immigrants. Mayor Yury Luzhkov told the delegation that finding a place for the workers was not Moscow’s problem.
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