Rules of the game
The Ministry of Finance, which is in charge of the gaming market regulation, is blatantly inactive: the authority has not dared to hold the cross-sectoral meeting named “What shall be done with the zones after all?”, which was planned in summer. Following it, some decisions would have to be taken: 20 of 30 months allocated by the law for launching the reservations have passed, and they are still in the form of fields untouched by human activities. In Primorie, Russkiy Island reserved for casinos was “swiped” by Dmitriy Medvedev for building a university. In Altay and Kaliningrad, all the efforts were spent on choosing sonorous names of the imagined Las-Vegases (“Sibirskaya Moneta” and “Yantarnaya”).
Some motion has been noticed only in Krasnodar and Rostov regions, sharing “Azov City” zone. But this is the very motion to budget expenditure. The local authorities have lessees for 40 out of 2,000 hectares of the zone, friendship with Austrian ASATI, the company that promises to raise a complex of air-inflated structures on the plot of the field allotted to it as soon as by June 1st, 2009, and, the most essential, 500 million rubles allocated by Krasnodar authorities from the regional budget. Kuban`s administration is making a public promise to dig these funds into the land of the zone in the form of engineering infrastructure (water piping, power, roads).
Who will get connected to the laid wires and pipes after the budget funds are developed is still vague. None of the relevant gambling and tourism operators intends to wade into the waters of the project. But there is news from enforcement agencies. In August, Kuban`s Public Prosecutor`s Office announced its interest in the process of selling “Azov City” lands. It turned out that the Department of Property Relations had officially refused to buy land plots in the would-be zone out from the local residents. As a result, profiteers got their hands on them. Eventually, the land had to be purchased from a natural entity, for a much higher price. The natural entity, which the Public Prosecutor`s Office is looking into now, obviously had more belief in the prospects of gaming business in the zones than the government.