Naro-Fominsk authorities sue military over highway project
Municipal authorities in the Moscow region are trying to overcome the resistance of the Russian Defense Ministry, which does not allow the construction of a bypass road around Naro-Fominsk through the lands of military forestries. Officials intend to prove in arbitration the municipality's right to dispose of the disputed plots. Experts say that such land disputes are not uncommon due to errors in state data registers.
“Kommersant” found in the file of the Arbitration Court of the Moscow Region a claim of the Property Management Committee of the Administration of the Naro-Fominsk Urban District against the Ministry of Defense and the subordinate Federal State Budgetary Institution “Forestry and Nature Management Department”. The third party is, among others, OOO “Naro-Fominskaya Toll Road” (a subsidiary of OOO “Toll Road”).
As reported to Kommersant by OOO Platnaya Doroga, the reason for the lawsuit was problems with the implementation of the project for a bypass of Naro-Fominsk. The construction of a 2.6 km long highway with two overpasses is provided for by a 2016 concession agreement between the city administration and the aforementioned OOO. The company planned to invest 1 billion rubles in the project and subsequently collect a toll (70 rubles per passenger car). This is the first municipal concession in Russia for the construction of a road without the use of budget funds.
During the implementation of the project, it became clear that part of the lands through which the route is to pass are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense. “But according to the Unified State Register of Real Estate, these plots are considered undivided property, the right to dispose of which belongs to the municipality,” the Platnaya Doroga company explained to Kommersant. “Since the boundaries of the plots overlap, the issue of their delimitation for further implementation of the project is being resolved together with the concession grantor.”
The Naro-Fominsk administration did not comment on the situation to Kommersant. According to the acts of execution of the agreement (published on the administration's website), the problem was discovered in 2021. The concessionaire contacted the Ministry of Defense with a request to exclude the plots from the boundaries of military forestries, but was refused. In 2023, the administration filed the first lawsuit against the military department to recognize this decision as illegal. But the Arbitration Court indicated that the disputed plots are in perpetual use of the Ministry of Defense and there are no grounds for alienating them. The cassation appeal was dismissed.
According to data published on the website of the Naro-Fominsk administration in November 2023, the concessionaire invested a total of more than 315 million rubles in the project (including funds for servicing loans). In the current lawsuit, the administration demands that the ownership of the site be recognized as “absent”. The Ministry of Defense did not respond to Kommersant's request.
The EGRN entry is of a title-confirming, not title-establishing nature, says Arina Dovzhenko, partner at Nordic Star law firm: “EGRN combines information from two registers: the State Real Estate Cadastre and the Unified Register of Rights to Real Estate and Transactions with It, which were conducted before 2017. There are often situations when there is a contradiction in information that could have migrated to EGRN.” Such situations occur in almost all regions, adds Viktor Morozov, head of the Construction and Real Estate practice at ProLex law firm: “The rights of the Ministry of Defense to plots are often not registered in the register of rights to real estate, which leads to such surprises for both individuals and municipalities and entities. I know of cases where regional authorities managed to reach an agreement with the ministry and the plots were excluded from the lands of the Ministry of Defense. But this is a long and painstaking process.”
This is not the first time that the Defense Ministry's lands in the southwest of the Moscow region have created difficulties for road workers. Thus, when designing the Central Ring Road in 2008-2011, the authorities decided not to make the western part of the highway (section 5) a new road, but to include a section of the "small concrete" A-107. As former Avtodor head Sergei Kelbakh told Kommersant in August 2013, this happened because the designers were not allowed to pass through the lands of the Taman Division in the Naro-Fominsk District. Moreover, the Defense Ministry is trying to have the court recognize the seizure of one of the sites for the construction of section 1 of the Central Ring Road in favor of Rosavtodor as illegal in 2021 (Kommersant reported this in May).
