Elena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, lost a court battle to reinstate the cadastral borders of a 24.4 hectare patch of city land owned by one of her companies, Vedomosti reported Monday.
The plot, located on the west side of Park Pobedy, is the focus of two court cases pitting Baturina against the government. While fighting both, the businesswoman, once a huge figure on the capital's real estate market, is demanding $1 billion in compensation from the Finance Ministry over her loss of the site.
The damages case will be heard in November. Monday's Supreme Arbitration Court decision upheld a December 2012 ruling on one of the two cases disputing Baturina's right to the land.
In one case, the Federal Property Management Agency claimed the borders registered by Baturina's company, Setunskaya, encroached on the territory of a neighboring plot and that the firm had failed to correct the error. The court ruled the registration of the plot illegal and ordered its removal from the cadaster.
In the second case, the agency claimed that 16.4 of the 24.4 hectares of the Setunskaya plot were allocated by presidential decree in 1993 to the construction of Chinese, Indian and Cuban embassies. In June 2012, a Moscow arbitration court reversed an earlier decision and ruled against Baturina's firm. Setunsksaya is appealing the ruling.
