In Chelyabinsk, 500 people are trying to get compensation for new apartments with cracks

Alexander Dybin

Residents of a residential area of Chelyabinsk called Park for more than two years have been trying to get compensation from the developer for defects and marriage.

About 500 people who were not satisfied with the quality of the purchased housing applied to the courts with a demand to pay a penalty.

"The developer may call it "consumer extremism", but we believe that this is not so," says a lawyer representing the interests of residents, "yes, these are economy class apartments, and people bought them with their last money. And during construction, it was saved on everything, plaster crumbles, cracks go, linoleum breaks, windows lead. People were sold this as a high-quality object and they should be responsible for it. If they had said right away that we were saving on everything, we would have sold it cheaper, and not for the full cost".

Residents say that problems began in the houses immediately after the delivery.

Somewhere they stopped closing the windows, cracks appeared between the floors, fittings began to rust in the wall panels, someone had water flooding the elevator equipment. In one of the apartments, linoleum swells in windy weather.

According to the lawyer, these mass courts could not have happened if the developer himself had not started to raise the topic of shortcomings. A couple of years ago, representatives of a construction company began to bypass the newly rented apartments and offered to sign a waiver for 10-20 thousand rubles. Then people took a closer look at the purchased housing, and discontent was formed, which resulted in the courts. Now, according to activists, the company owes them about 50 million rubles. For a company with billions of turnover, this is not much, but the builders refused to pay voluntarily, and the bailiffs did not help people.

"The courts were won at the beginning of last year, but the bailiffs did nothing," says Mikhail, "we insisted on arresting the company's accounts, we knew for sure that the money was there. According to the extracts from the Rosreestr, it was clear that the company transferred apartments, which means it received money for them. At market prices, during this time they received about a billion, it would not be difficult to recover our 50 million. Instead, the bailiffs arrested the apartments that were owned by the developer, they told us that they would sell them at auction".

Developer - in the house

People were afraid that nothing would come out with the arrest of apartments, since the company would simply go into bankruptcy and all bailiffs' arrests would be lifted. And so it turned out.

"We had a deadline – until October 2022, while the moratorium on bankruptcy was in effect," says a representative of the residents, "but we could not convince the bailiffs to arrest the accounts. And two days before the end of the moratorium, the developer himself refused it, after 4 minutes, one of his contractors filed an application for the intention to file for bankruptcy. This is evident from the documents".

Now the Chelyabinsk Grazhdanstroy company has introduced a monitoring procedure.

People will now have to go a long way to participate in the arbitration process in order to receive their compensation. They will find themselves in a common queue with all the creditors of the developer, and it is not yet a fact that the company has enough assets to pay.

As stated to Novye Izvestia in the press service of the main department of the bailiff service in the Chelyabinsk region, no violations were found in the work on debt collection from the developer.

"Consolidated enforcement proceedings are being enforced against OJSC Construction Company Chelyabinsk Grazhdanstroy in favor of more than 1.3 thousand recoverers for a total debt of about 200 million rubles", - the department reported, "the bailiff has applied a full and exhaustive set of enforcement measures. The incoming funds were distributed in order of priority to the recoverers, the identified property was arrested and passed the evaluation procedure. In April 2022, the consolidated enforcement proceedings were suspended due to the fact that the debtor took advantage of the moratorium on the initiation of bankruptcy proceedings. As part of the partially suspended enforcement proceedings, arrests on the real estate of the debtor organization were retained. In October 2022, enforcement proceedings were resumed, the bailiff continued work on the enforcement of the requirements contained in the enforcement documents. By the ruling of the Arbitration Court of the Chelyabinsk Region in February 2023, the monitoring stage used in the bankruptcy case was applied to the debtor organization OJSC "Construction Company "Chelyabinsk Grazhdanstroy". In accordance with the legislation on enforcement proceedings, the bailiff issued resolutions on the suspension of enforcement proceedings, except for those for which property claims are current. Courts of various instances have repeatedly given a legal assessment of the actions of bailiffs, no violations were found".

The office of the construction company demanded a written request, but by the time the material was published, the response to the editorial office of Novye Izvestia had not been received.

Chelyabinsk Grazhdanstroy is the oldest construction company in Chelyabinsk. But in recent years it has been in crisis. Thus, the file of arbitration cases contains data on several processes related to corporate disputes within the company. So the former owner Vyacheslav Bryukhin tried to return the operational management of the company through the court. At some point, he was removed from the leadership, although he remained the owner of the share. Another lawsuit is related to an attempt to return a sold asset – a reinforced concrete panel plant located in the neighboring city of Miass. This company is a much more valuable asset than a construction company. But a few years ago it changed ownership. And now they are trying to challenge this decision.

And while the owners of the company are arguing for assets, people are waiting for their compensation, by the way, not so big (about 100,000 rubles for an apartment). Residents wrote a collective appeal to the prosecutor's office with a request to understand the situation and the actions of the bailiffs, including.