... largest fraud schemes over the past 10 years has affected 70,000 homebuyers who were cheated out of their investments after the developer vanished or declared bankruptcy. The overwhelming majority of the victims were middle-class Russians who bought apartments during the early stages of construction because this is the only way to purchase a new apartment at a relatively affordable price. In addition, because of the high demand for apartments in new buildings, buyers have to purchase early because...

... penthouse. Monaco-based potash tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlyev has bought the priciest piece of residential real estate in New York City, paying $88 million for a Manhattan penthouse, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Rybolovlyev purchased the apartment from a former head of Citigroup in the name of a trust for his daughter Yekaterina, a 22-year-old college student, the newspaper reported. The previous record residential sale in New York was the $53 million purchase of a townhouse by a private-equity...

About 850 high-end apartments were available for rent in Moscow at the end of last year according to industry experts, with more than half of that number costing approximately $6,000 per month. About 850 high-end apartments were available...

The apartment-museum of Russian-born writer and Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Brodsky may open in St. Petersburg as a joint cultural project between Russia and the United States. ST. PETERSBURG — The apartment-museum of Russian-born...

The former head of a Moscow construction agency responsible for financing the completion of partially built apartment blocks has been arrested for stealing 1.5 billion rubles ($49.8 million) from the city budget. The former head of a Moscow construction agency responsible for financing the completion of partially built apartment blocks has been arrested...

... property tax and is supposed to replace the existing land tax and individual property tax — was first voiced by the government 11 years ago, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in 2009 that the move should lower the tax burden on owners of small apartments. Analysts said it might put more properties on the market and bring down prices. The new tax will be based on a property's market value, not the current artificially low numbers set by technical inventory bureaus, or BTI — a system created...

... court appearance Monday in Chicago and waived his rights to further hearings. Judge Morton Denlow then ordered Muhtorov to be transferred to Denver, but it wasn’t immediately clear how soon that would happen. No one answered the door Monday at an apartment where the FBI said Muhtorov lived. Investigators obtained a search warrant for Muhtorov’s apartment for a laptop computer, a Blackberry cell phone, and permission to search two e-mail accounts they said were used by Muhtorov, according...

A one-day-old child was left on the ground outside a Moscow apartment building despite a temperature of minus 20 C, before being found and picked up by a passerby. A one-day-old child was left on the ground outside a Moscow apartment building despite a temperature of minus 20 C, before being found and picked...

... at the bumbling stupidity that can lie behind even the most serious events. The hardwood floors at Teatr.doc are scrubbed as never before. Entirely covering the theater's famous grungy, black wall is a huge, colorful canvas bearing a diagram of an apartment one might find in a real estate ad. The illustrated apartment has a bedroom with a bed covered in a pretty yellow blanket, a living room with a two-seater sofa featuring decorative pillows, a spic-and-span kitchen and a bathroom. On stage seven...

... gone after 2007, when the production facilities of Krasny Oktyabr — one of Russia's oldest confectionary factories — were removed from the city center to the outskirts, to give way to a big development project with cafes and restaurants, apartment complexes, museums and underground parking, which analysts said could be worth more than $120 million. The project will be implemented on the 50,000 square meters of land on Bersenevskaya embankment, acquired by Guta Development along with the...

... known as “social housing,” in Russia at a round table. The quantity and scope of state provided housing in Russia is very limited compared with many other countries, particularly in Europe, and families in Moscow can wait up to 10 years for apartments, according to city officials. There are 414 apartments per 1,000 people in Russia, which is significantly below the European Union figure of 450 per 1,000 people, said Wolfgang Amann, a member of the Real Estate Market Advisory Group of the...

... opposition activism. Screen shots of the e-mails, which date from November to December 2011, and summaries by bloggers who started downloading them Tuesday via Twitter paint an embarrassing portrait, especially of Yakemenko. He discusses buying ritzy apartments and electronics and smearing anti-corruption whistleblower Alexei Navalny. In one e-mail, a subordinate proposes videotaping a Navalny impersonator approaching passersby to ask for money, since the United States, he would say, has cut off funding...

... tried to sell 4 grams of heroin to an agent and that nine grams of the drug were found in her Smolensk home. An Interior Ministry spokesperson told Interfax that the case was built around witnesses' testimony, lab reports and searches conducted at her apartment. Osipova's lawyer, Natalya Shaposhnikova, told The Moscow Times at the time of the trial that investigators based their evidence on reports by pro-Kremlin Nashi youth activists who had been used by police investigators to track opposition activities...

... actually hampering foreign capital flow into the country. In January 2012, Russia's Supreme Arbitration Court (SAC) published a ruling prohibiting taxpayers with foreign capital from deducting interest they pay on loans "with a foreign element." Apart from the prospect of reducing foreign investments, this ruling may already entail considerable taxes being additionally assessed on Russian borrowers when tax audits are held. Julia Alexandrova Senior Associate Pepeliaev Group Alongside actively...

... rubles ($50 million) in a mixture of equity and debt into Revolta over the next two years, the fund’s financial director Jonathan New told The Moscow Times. The publicly accessible charging stations, designed to overcome the problem that urban apartment residents face when charging an electric vehicle, or EV, will be built in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Kaluga, Revolta general director Maxim Osorin said. Regular stations using the same power as an ordinary household...

... called the figure "excessive," saying that candidates actually have to submit 3 million signatures because a large part will be declared invalid. But to collect the 3 million signatures, he said, activists have to visit 25 million to 30 million apartments while all of Russia only has about 40 million apartments. "The principle in action here is: Everything for our friends, nothing for others," Kynev said. The Duma parties are widely seen as a puppet opposition. Golos said in the booklet...

... powerless," Putin said at a meeting of the Federal Migration Service, Interfax reported. "I contend that here penalties of a criminal nature should be stipulated," Putin said. Property owners who illegally register hundreds of people in their apartments should also face criminal charges, the prime minister said. (MT)

... Speaking in a Brussels hotel room, she kept her composure, except when recalling how she learned about her son's arrest. The bomb explosion took place last April 11 during evening rush hour on the platform of one of Minsk's busiest metro stations. Apart from the final death toll of 15, about 200 people were wounded. Vladislav had left home the previous year to work in Minsk as an electrician, so she tried to call him. "I was worried because he uses the metro to get to work," she said...

The Moscow head of an international advertising company was found dead in his apartment following an apparent suicide, investigators said Sunday. Oleg Khripunov, the 52-year-old chief of Out There Media's Russian office, was discovered Saturday with a gunshot to his head in his home on Ulitsa Kosygina in southwestern Moscow, Interfax...

... Deluxe is located 21 kilometers outside of Moscow and borders on the elite village of Gorki 8. Polyanka Deluxe consists of 72 cottages with a total area of more than 20,000 square meters. "They are buying houses in this village as company-owned apartments for officials who will move there after the transfer of federal departments and agencies to the territory of 'new Moscow,'" the paper said. (MT)