Land on demand – Newspaper Kommersant No. 171 (7372) dated 09/16/2022

A draft law approved yesterday by the government on accelerating the involvement of unclaimed agricultural land in circulation has been submitted to the State Duma. According to it, during, in fact, the transition period, until January 1, 2025, municipalities will be able to lease such plots, as well as participate in the general meeting of owners – after this date, unclaimed shares will become their property. Lawyers evaluate the bill very ambiguously: some believe that this will allow for prompt management decisions regarding such shares, but do not exclude the risk of abuse on the ground, others note that it creates a mechanism for seizing property rights that is deprived of judicial guarantees.

The White House yesterday submitted to the State Duma a bill simplifying the procedure for transferring unclaimed shares of agricultural land to municipalities. As Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin explained at a government meeting, the document is designed to speed up their return to circulation. Let us clarify that unclaimed land shares are understood as land shares that the owner does not dispose of for three years or more in a row, or if there is no information about such an owner. “Many such sites are simply abandoned, but often not even properly designed over the past 30 years – in a number of Russian subjects they accounted for up to a quarter of the total area of ​​the region,” the prime minister specified.

It should be noted that the authorities have been working on solving the problem of unused agricultural land, the total area of ​​​​which is estimated at more than 40 million hectares, for several years. The “contribution” of unclaimed land shares is very noticeable – according to the Ministry of Agriculture, by 2019, municipalities included 1.5 million shares with a total area of ​​15.3 million hectares in the lists of unclaimed land shares. And if the procedure for recognizing land as unclaimed is quite simple (the municipality draws up a list of such shares and submits it for approval by the general meeting of participants in shared ownership of the site itself), then further recognition of municipal ownership of them still remains a problem.

The current legislation provides for a judicial procedure for such recognition, however, as noted in the explanatory note to the government’s draft, this mechanism does not work de facto: the location of the defendant is usually unknown.

Over the past two years, the Ministry of Agriculture has been developing options for reconfiguring regulation, in particular, it was proposed to extend the rules for recognizing immovable things as ownerless to such cases, but this caused criticism of the codification council (see Kommersant dated March 31, 2021).

As the government explained to Kommersant, “during the preparation of the bill, the concept changed – it was decided to abandon the need to recognize unclaimed shares as ownerless things.” According to the project, until January 1, 2025, there will be a transitional period, during which time the municipalities will be able to participate in the general meeting of participants in shared ownership on behalf of the “silent shareholder”, as well as rent out land recognized as unclaimed. Due to this mechanism, the authorities expect to increase the area of ​​agricultural land used, since during the transition period the plots will actually be involved in circulation (however, the bill does not describe the procedure for transfer and the grounds for receiving rent).

Since 2025, “silent equity holders”, if they have not declared themselves, lose their ownership of their plots – the property automatically goes to the municipality, if it has not previously filed a lawsuit to secure ownership of it (in this case, the issue will be resolved in court order). The procedure for transferring shares of land plots whose owners have died and there are no heirs to municipal ownership is also simplified: now such situations are considered grounds for recognizing the share as unclaimed, and according to the bill they will be considered escheat property – the municipality will inherit the ownership of them.

As Nikita Filippov, head of the De Jure Lawyers’ Bureau, notes, on the one hand, the municipal authorities will be able to quickly make decisions regarding unclaimed land shares, but on the other hand, local excesses are likely. In particular, he explains, the risks associated with the transfer of lease rights at a reduced price to persons affiliated with municipal authorities, as well as the possibility of actions that run counter to the interests of the owners of shares, at general meetings are not ruled out. Yury Fedyukin, managing partner of Enterprise Legal Solutions, is skeptical about the amendments: “The procedure is not drastically simplified, because if the owner is unknown and it is not possible to find him, and the current procedure for recognizing municipal property through the court does not in itself create insurmountable obstacles.” However, according to Roman Shugaev, an expert in the Legal Development direction of the CSR, the bill creates “anti-constitutional mechanisms for the seizure of property rights free of charge and deprived of the necessary judicial guarantees.”

Evgenia Kryuchkova