JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES' PROPERTY TRANSFERRED TO MEDICAL INSTITUTE
Delovoi Peterburg, 25 April 2018
The immovable property of the banned sect of Jehovah's Witnesses in St. Petersburg and Solnechnoe, worth 1.5 billion rubles, has been turned over to the V.A. Almazov Medical Research Center, which specializes in cardiology.
A year ago, in April 2017, the sect of Jehovah's Witnesses was liquidated in Russia, after this religious organizations was ruled to be extremist. It was ordered to seize all of its property and to transfer it to federal ownership.
Delovoi Peterburg has ascertained that in St. Petersburg the most liquid assets of the Witnesses have been turned over to the Almazov Medical Research Center, which specializes in cardiology and heart surgery. It has already been given the Hall of Congresses on Kolomyazhsk Prospect and in addition the center is laying claim to the largest and most valuable asset of the Jehovists, land in Kurortny district, not far from the Finnish Gulf.
The V.A. Almazov Medical Research Center (a federal center controlled by the Ministry of Health) will begin on 1 September 2018 to give students basic medical education in the specialty "General Medicine." This year 100 students will begin their studies, DP was told in the center. Previously, in the Almazov Medical Research Center there were programs in general residence, post-graduate, and supplementary professional education.
Thereby the Almazov center will become the first scientific research center in Russia that will begin to provide higher education to medical students. At present one can receive medication education only in institutions of higher education. The decision for implementing such a pilot project was signed by President Vladimir Putin in July 2017. For the new functions the center needed additional space. The Almazov Center applied to Rosimushchestvo [Federal Property Management Agency] for the transfer to it of the two largest buildings of the Jehovah's Witnesses in St. Petersburg: a building of 6,000 square meters on 10 hectares of land at 20 Kolomyazhsk Prospect (the former Hall of Congresses) and a suburban complex of the Jehovists in Solnechnoe, where buildings of 30,000 square meters (including 10,000 square meters of residential space) were built on 7.1 hectares of land.
The Jehovists received the land on Kolomyazhsk from St. Petersburg in the 1990s on an investment contract. On the land in Solnechnoe there previously had been a departmental children's camp that they bought.
"We requested all of this complex of property, both on Kolomyazhsk Prospect and in the village of Solnechnoe for educational goals for the creation of a specialty on the base of the federal budgetary institution. On Kolomyazhsk it is planned to arrange educational activity and also to use the buildings in Solnechnoe for educational purposes and to meet the needs for dormitories and other infrastructure," the director of Almazov, Irina Bunkova, explains.
So far the request has been partially granted. The institution has been fully granted the property on Kolomyazhsk Prospect; according to information of Rosreestra, the former Hall of Congresses and the land has been in use by the Almazov Center since November 2017. On the south, this parcel borders on a children's treatment and rehabilitation complex of the Almazov Center, and on the north by a lot where it is planned to build a scientific educational complex.
The center will use its own resources to refit the building of the Jehovists on Kolomyazhsky. "The building was transferred in good condition. All the electrical network, plumbing, and heating work completely. For purposes of medical education it needs some cosmetic renovation, information technology equipment, and some reconstruction, which will be conducted in the near future," the Almazov Center explained.
In Solnechnoe, the center has still been given only two buildings: a boiler room with an area of 150 square meters at 6 Sredny St, and one apartment at 8 Sredny St. This was immovable property that belonged directly to the liquidated Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia. Until 2010, all assets in Solnechnoe belonged to the same organization, but then they were reregistered to a foreign legal entity, the "Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania." This organization is located outside the boundaries of Russian jurisdiction, and that means Russian authorities cannot liquidate it. However in December the Sestroretsk district court ruled the donation contract between the Russian Witnesses and the Pennsylvania Witnesses to be invalid, which permits the seizure of the real estate. Religious leaders are trying to appeal this decision in appellate court.
"If the court leaves in place the decision of the court of first instance, then when it takes legal effect we certainly will again submit a request to Rosimushchestvo for the immovable property in Solnechnoe," Irina Bunkova says. "But if they do not turn over to us this parcel, we will use for carrying out our scientific educational project a building of 65,000 square meters whose construction is planned to the north of the land of the Jehovhists on Kolomyazhsk Prospect." Last week the Ministry of Health prepared the governmental order for allocating 6.8 billion rubles for construction of this center.
On the whole, the Almazov Center, judging by everything, does not lack real estate. In addition to the aforementioned complexes, for example, construction of a suburban children's recovery center is planned in Zelenogorsk.
And the center does not lack influential patrons. The council of trustees is headed by the speaker of the Federation Council, Valentina Matvienko, the former governor of St. Petersburg. It also includes the president of Sberbank, German Gref, the president of the Zenit football club, Sergei Fursenko, the artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, Valery Gergiev, and the rector of ITMO, Vladimir Vasiliev. There are also businessmen among the trustees, for example, the head of the Biocad and Gerofarm pharmaceutical companies.
The sect of Jehovah's Witnesses was introduced to the Russian empire in 1913, but in the Soviet Union is what effectively prohibited. The Witnesses were officially registered in 1989. In the almost 30 years of existence in modern Russia the organization has been able to acquire hundreds of thousands of meters of immovable property and dozens of hectares of land from Sakhalin to St. Petersburg.
In the Northern Capital, besides the assets on which the Almazov is making a claim, the Witnesses also have a land parcel on Chernyakhovsky Prospect and five apartments, according to documents of the arbitration court. According to excerpts of Rosreestr it is evident that in the main the apartments were donated or left as a heritage. Now some of them have already found new owners.
According to records of EGRN, one apartment, for example, was turned over to the Chief Investigation Directorate of the Investigative Committee of RF for St. Petersburg, and another to the Department of Rosreestr for Leningrad oblast.
Rosimushchestvo explained to DP: all property of the Witnesses will primarily be turned over to federal institutions and organizations. "After settling accounts with creditors, the remaining real estate will be granted, first, to territorial agencies of federal agencies of the government and federal institutions for distribution," DP was told in Rosimushchestvo. If FGUPs wishing to get space are not found, they will be put up for auction.
However, settling accounts with creditors in St. Petersburg still has not happened. The arbitration manager Sergei Kryazhev, who is entrusted with the distribution of the Jehovah's Witnesses' property throughout all of Russia, was not able to explain to DP how the inventory and transfer to the treasury of the Russian Federation of Jehovah's Witness' property were going. "I still have distributed nothing to anybody. Who is to give what to whom I do not know. The property that the court has entrusted to me, I will deal with," he says.
We note that the assets that have been transferred to the Almazov Center also were enumerated in the court's decision among those that the arbitration manager should deal with.
"Apparently there is some confusion. We will clarify it and figure it out," Sergei Kryazhev says.
Early last year, before the liquidation, the Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia tried to protect their property. Jehovists received instructions to reregister all Russian real estate for various European and American organizations. The process of reregistration, for example, was also begun for the property on Kolomyazhsk Prospect. However Rosreestr delayed this and similar transactions. Jehovists tried to challenge these decisions in Russian courts, but without success. Now religious leaders are hoping to defend their property rights in the European Court of Human Rights and consideration of the case there has already been scheduled. The Ministry of Justice explained that it has already sent its position to the ECHR with the argumentation for the legality of the liquidation of the organization.
Commentary by Dmitry Morozov, general director of BIOCAD:
In my view, to take up basic medical education is a very logical step on the part of the Almazov Center, inasmuch as training of future medics is unthinkable without practice. Western experience shows that education and research should go hand in hand. And such cooperation is useful both for the one and for the other. Students receive the experience of research thinking and researchers receive the possibility of continuity and a fresh view in the area of their studies. The Almazov Center has great research and mentoring experience and I am sure that this new undertaking will be crowned with success.
Commentary of Yaroslav Sivulsky, representative of the European Association of Jehovah's Witnesses:
Of course, with regard to Kolomyazhsk, there are no options for challenging, because we have lost all trials in the Russian Federation and now there remains only the European court. With regard to Solnechnoe, we will still fight in appellate instances in the city court and we will defend our correctness there. But there is little hope. There is no hope. We are conducting rebuttals (of the treatment of agreements of donation of property of Russian legal entities to foreigners as invalid—ed.) also in other regions of Russia. But in the main we are losing all trials because the bias of the prosecution on religious grounds is evident. Although this cannot withstand any criticism. Property should not be seized from a foreign organization that has nothing to do with the legal entity that was liquidated in Russia. We submitted an appeal to the European court and it has already communicated on our part and the response of the Russian Federation has already been received. The appeal is proceeding on expedited consideration. Usually the ECHR considers all cases for a long time, but in view of the egregious violation of law that has happened now, the decision may be faster than usual. The European court will consider the whole complex of violations of our rights, both the liquidation itself and the illegal, in our view, confiscation of property, because from our point of view there are no bases for it. This all has been created artificially and, as we see, a simply harsh expropriation is occurring, like what happened in 1917 in Russia, when churches were seized and destroyed. So this is what is happening now with Witnesses. And who knows who will be next? I do not know which, the specific figures, but it seems to me that now a reversion to the past is happening. In the soviet time, the Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted on ideological considerations. But then Witnesses were granted registration and they were recognized as victims of political repression. And now history is repeating itself. Even those who do not like us very much understand that Jehovah's Witnesses are not extremists. This is now too much. (tr. by PDS, posted 2 May 2018)
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