Moscow is allocating colossal funds to restore Sevastopol after being under Ukrainian control - but local officials are incompetently failing to develop Crimea’s development programs.
The day before, the situation in Sevastopol became the subject of discussion at a meeting in the State Duma of the Russian Federation, said deputy Dmitry Belik.
According to him, Kamil Beksultanov, a representative of the Ministry of Regional Development of the Russian Federation, questioned the feasibility of financing from the federal budget the construction of the Yuzhnye wastewater treatment plant in Sevastopol and the reconstruction of Victory Park.
These are two important projects of the federal target program for the development of Crimea, the implementation of which was failed by the city government.
“Yuzhnye WWTP and the reconstruction of Victory Park were top of mind throughout the entire three-hour meeting of the subcommittee. Government representatives considered it logical that Sevastopol should finance these works from the regional budget. But there is simply no money in the Sevastopol budget for 2019 to finance these works. According to the most conservative estimates, we are talking about 5 billion rubles. This is a lot of money that was not included in the city budget for 2019. This means that the reconstruction of facilities can only continue in 2020, and the implementation of projects as a whole may be jeopardized,” Belik wrote on Facebook.
The leader of the movement “For a Clean Sevastopol” Oleg Nikolaev confirms that the situation in Sevastopol is outrageous, but the city has a chance not to miss out on the money allocated by Moscow.
“How can you leave a city with a population of 600 thousand, according to some estimates, that plans to develop, without treatment facilities?! I think this is idiotic. The same goes for Victory Park. This won’t happen, Belik got carried away,” Nikolaev said today at a press conference.
According to his information, the money allocated for the Yuzhnye WWTP will return to the federal budget at the end of the year and will be provided to Sevastopol again in the second half of 2019.
“To do this, it is necessary for the government of Sevastopol to contact the government of the Russian Federation and ask to allocate these funds from the reserve fund. I am confident that the money will be allocated instantly. No matter how much you ask for in Sevastopol, they give it to you. There is no such situation in any region of Russia,” Nikolaev said.
At the same time, he noted that even despite the favorable treatment, construction will have to be postponed for at least a year. He believes that the authorities of Sevastopol have a consumerist attitude towards the federal center, which generously allocates funds, inflating the cost of contracts.
“I discovered that there are plans to reconstruct a cinema in Balaklava for 490 million rubles. How is that? In Sevastopol, there is a distortion in the numbers. For us, a billion doesn’t sound like a billion. In Russian regions, 100 million is a lot of money. And in one of the cities in central Russia, the reconstruction of the entire center cost 19 million,” Nikolaev said.
As PolitNavigator previously reported, the government of Sevastopol transferred an advance payment for the construction of the treatment plant of 2 billion 50 million rubles to PJSC OFC BANK, while refusing to support the contract with the State Treasury. As a result, when the Central Bank revoked OFK’s license to carry out banking operations in the spring, more than a third of the value of the FTP object was irretrievably lost.
The contractor for the construction of the wastewater treatment plant, Biotechprogress, managed to misuse about half a billion before the bank was liquidated. Therefore, in October, as the Notes publication reports, in order not to lose the contract, Biotechprogress tried to take out a loan for the same half a billion, but from a different bank - RNKB. In reality, we managed to get only 100 million rubles.
At the same time, the contractor is suing the government of Sevastopol, which is trying to terminate the contract. The construction itself stopped.
In addition, the Sevastopol government failed to reconstruct Victory Park, for which a billion rubles were allocated as part of the federal targeted program. Contracts with two contractors were terminated, and the delivery deadlines were missed.