The government will not restore luxurious mansions to previous dimensions after the fire: the owners should have registered them instead of evading taxes.
Vladimir Putin again touched upon the issue of residential construction for those who lost their homes to the wild fires (for details see our yesterday's issue and kp.ru web-site) during his tour of Ryazan Region. "People must receive houses no less in area than those burnt down in the fires," said the premier, but clarified: "Of course, except huge mansions hundreds and thousands of square meters in area. It so happens that many such mansions were not registered properly so their owners could save on taxes."
These sly owners have also suffered, agreed Putin.
"Also, if they had the money to build such houses, they should have found the money to pay for insurance," he remarked.
VIP fire victims like everybody else will be paid not less than two million rubles to have their houses restored. As for those who agreed to new construction instead of monetary compensation, they have gained Putin's protection.
"We talked to people today and one of them told me: 'My house was 49 square metres in area and now I am offered 45'. So give them 50!" Vladimir Putin said to the local authorities. "This won't make anybody poorer. There's no need to make people suffer from excessive formalities."
During his tour the prime minister also chaired a meeting on GLONASS, the new Russian navigation system. Putin reminded participants that 60 billion rubles has already been spent on this project and another 48 billion will be invested over the next two years. In contrast with many Russian regions, our foreign colleagues, including Ukraine, Belarus, India, Cuba and Kazakhstan have shown interest in the system.
"Each in his own way," said the prime minister, "this is why engineering solutions are incompatible with each other at the departmental and regional levels. For example, ground controllers simply cannot track an ambulance or police cars when they cross the region boundaries."
Therefore, Vladimir Putin has given the regional authorities the task to develop and adopt their own GLONASS applications by 2011. In addition he put forward some very ambitious ideas:
"I think that starting in 2012 all new cars in Russia could be sold with standard GLONASS receivers in order to increase traffic security in the country."
By Maxim Volodin