The projected Italian Quarter on the northern shore of Lake Shartash in Yekaterinburg might lose its primary developer. The General Director of Atomstroycomplex Valeriy Ananyev announced he was not going to stay in the project any longer.

The Italian Quarter was a project devised within the framework of a cooperation agreement between Yekaterinburg and Genoa. The construction site near Northern Shartash was meant for an ‘Italian village’. The construction started in 2005 but had to be frozen in July 2008. According to the regional government’s latest statements, ?500m were needed to resume the implementation of the project.

‘This is a very costly challenge, since we need to change the entire infrastructure of Northern Shartash in order to create the infrastructure for the quarter. If we try to solve the infrastructure problem only within the given area, it will turn out to be so expensive that no one will ever be able to buy any property there. This enterprise was a very risky one from the start. It seems our Italian partners were laboring under a sort of delusion,’ Valeriy Ananyev explained at a press conference in Yekaterinburg.

‘The project’s other investor UMMC Holding declared that they were interested in the land allotment. This means we used to have a problem land allotment at first because there was no infrastructure to speak of, and now we have no land either. This is why I am no longer interested in the project,’ he said.

‘We are still the official institutors of the project, but if someone asks me to sell them my share of it, I will gladly do so. I am actually not clear about the ways and mechanisms of its implementation,’ Ananyev added.