Construction cadastre - Newspaper Kommersant No. 227 (7428) dated 07.12.2022
The Moscow Arbitration Court issued a decision obliging the Moscow City Hall to recalculate the payment for changing the type of permitted use of land in the north of the capital due to a decrease in its cadastral value. The PIK group is building the Dmitrovsky Park residential complex on the site. This is the first such court decision that could provoke a series of similar lawsuits from landowners and developers, lawyers do not exclude. Developers have been asking the mayor's office to reduce payments for changing the designation of plots for several years, but this has not yet yielded results.
The Moscow Arbitration Court, at the suit of Algorithm Project LLC, ordered the Moscow City Property Department (DGI) to recalculate the fee for changing the type of permitted use (VRI) of the site due to a decrease in the cadastral value of the land, Kommersant found in the filing cabinet. We are talking about 8.5 hectares on Lobnenskaya street in the north of Moscow. In 2018, one of the structures of PIK Group bought this site from Algorithm Project for 1.65 billion rubles. and builds on the site of the residential complex "Dmitrovsky Park", follows from the transaction documents. Before the sale of the site, Algorithm Project managed to reduce its cadastral value from 3.2 billion rubles. up to 2.1 billion rubles, according to the materials of the court.
PIK Group declined to comment. It was not possible to contact Algorithm Project. The DGI told Kommersant that the department does not agree with the court's decision to recalculate the fee for changing the VRI.
In November 2020, the Moscow Mayor's Office doubled the fee for permitting the use of land plots where developers want to build housing in the old city limits and eight times in New Moscow. The VRI of the disputed site on Lobnenskaya Street, which was originally intended to operate the 5th Central Military Clinical Hospital, was changed in 2018, and housing was allowed to be built on the site. In December 2020, DGI filed a lawsuit to recover 2.1 billion rubles. for changing the VRI of this section. But the court has not yet made a decision on this case, and the proceedings were suspended in October 2022 until the decision on the Algorithm Project and DGI case comes into force.
This is the first time that a developer has managed to achieve a recalculation of the fee for changing the VRI, notes Almaz Kuchembaev, head of the legal agency Kuchembaev and Partners. A Kommersant source says that developers have long been looking for "a loophole to reduce the fee for changing the VRI land." “The developers did not dare to sue directly with the Moscow mayor's office, so as not to spoil relations with them,” says the interlocutor of Kommersant. Therefore, he does not exclude, PIK Group of Companies is not suing directly on behalf of its structures, but through the former owner of the land on Lobnenskaya Street.
Yury Fedyukin, managing partner of Enterprise Legal Solutions, believes that the court made a balanced and well-founded decision. He hopes that it will be able to gain a foothold in higher instances. In this case, this practice will spread to the entire market, adds Almaz Kuchembaev. This is possible only if the developers manage to challenge the cadastral value of the land, Yuri Fedyukin adds. “They could have done it before, but if it was prevented by factors outside the legal plane, then most likely they can prevent it further,” he notes.
If the decision stands in higher instances, then PIK Group will be able to reduce the fee for changing the VRI by about a third in proportion to the decrease in the cadastral value of the site, that is, from 2.1 billion rubles. up to 1.4 billion rubles, notes Almaz Kuchembaev. But in order for the Moscow City Hall to avoid this and not lose most of the budgetary replenishment, it will be necessary to change the formula for calculating the fee for VRI, by analogy with the Moscow Region, where changes in the cadastral value may not be taken into account at all, he believes.
Developers have been in dialogue with the Moscow Mayor's Office for more than a year to change the procedure for calculating the fee for changing the VRI, but so far to no avail, says Oleg Grishunin, director of legal and corporate affairs at BEL Development Group. Therefore, developers, he concludes, are unlikely to be able to change the calculation scheme.
