Khimki discussion: No European involvement in corruption in Russia

On 26 June 2012, my Finish colleague Satu Hassi and I organized a discussion in the European Parliament about the confrontations associated with the construction of a motorway through Khimki Forest, a nature reserve and recreation area for Moscow. Civil-society protests against the controversial project have been the target of harassment and violence for years. Although the EU has distanced itself from the project, there are reasons to fear that the French company Vinci may be implicated in corruption in it. The event also had the support of the French MEPs Michèle Rivasi (Greens / EFA) and Corinne Lepage (ALDE). Russian participants attending were the journalist Oksana Chelysheva, Evgenia Chirikova, chairperson of the NGO Defend the Khimki Forest, and Nikolay Lyaskin, member of the opposition movement Solidarnost.

Evgenia Chirikova, a resident of the Moscow suburb of Khimki, started off the discussion by giving an account of the development of the protests, which were initially launched by local residents, but rapidly gained national and international support following the intensification of conflicts with government authorities and the project’s backers. There is evidence that multiple laws and regulations have been circumvented and flouted in order to push the project through. Moreover, environmental activists peacefully protesting illegal logging have repeatedly been subjected to violent attack. Instead of prosecuting the perpetrators of those attacks, authorities have arrested and imposed fines or official constraints on the protesters themselves. Meanwhile, detailed studies of the concrete plans and designs for the project keep revealing new irregularities concerning the planning of the route, the financing and developers and other bodies involved in the construction.

For those reasons, I called on the European Commission, the European Council and the EBRD and EIB back in September of 2010 to put a stop to European participation in the financing of this extremely controversial project. Their decision to refrain from co-financing activities for the project, which runs counter to basic democratic rights, was reconfirmed in June of 2011; however a report from the organization Bankwatch suggests that Vinci, the French firm contracted to construct the motorway, may be involved in corruption in the project, which is being financed through a complex web of offshore entities and President Putin’s friend and judo trainer Arkadi Rotenberg.

Disappointingly, no Vinci representatives were able to take part in the discussion. To promote clarification of the issues, Evgenia Chirikova travelled onward from the event to Paris to attend a hearing at the French Senate. To that same end, my MEP colleagues and I have already made arrangements to meet with Vinci in early September of this year at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. We also initiated a parliamentary question to the European Commission today for the purposes of further elucidation of the case by European institutions.

As representatives of the European Union, we believe that it is important that this case be cleared up swiftly, in order to prevent a misuse of European funds and circumvention of European laws that would counteract our political efforts to combat corruption in Europe and in European-Russian relations. Especially where, as is the case with Khimki, elementary democratic rights are being violated.

Attachments:

• Bankwatch Report of April 2012 (English, Russian)
• Parl. question to COM Vinci/ Khimki of 12 July 12