'It’s good that the region’s prosecution bodies have promptly reacted to the problems related to local practice of giving land allotments to developers. Yet their actions have seriously slowed down the process of getting all the papers filed and approved of,’ the spokesperson for Yekaterinburg municipal council Konstantin Pudov reports.

In the meantime, the regional authorities claim that their withdrawal of documents regarding the land distribution never hindered the implementation of the national project known as Affordable Housing to Russian Citizens, and papers on most of the cases were given back to the city council a few days after the search had been done.

'We still haven’t been given back papers on a few big cases. The housing market, like any other one, is very dynamic and sensitive to all the important events and time shifts; in this case, we had been immobilized for over a week, and a lot of developers suffered losses as a result,’ Mr. Pudov said.

'I must also say that the media had been getting some reports even prior to the papers being withdrawn; this kind of negative publicity might have been used to blacken the city council and damage its reputation. These actions (perhaps somewhat inappropriate) stirred Yekaterinburg’s entire building community. There really was a threat of the national project becoming ruined, and all the developers are still under a lot of pressure,’ he observed.