MOSCOW, January 17 (RIA Novosti) - A Moscow court invalidated Thursday the sale of a dacha outside Moscow that late last year was at the center of a political scandal involving ex-premier Mikhail Kasyanov.
The Moscow Arbitration Court returned the Sosnovka-3 plot to state property and ordered that Veltex, the company that bought the land, be repaid 10.1 million rubles ($360,000).
The lawsuit had been filed by the Federal Property Department.
The department signed a deal with Russian oil company Evikhon in September 1996, through which the company obtained a 49-year lease for Sosnovka-1 and Sosnovka-3.
Evikhon subsequently sold its tenant's rights to state company VPK Invest, which in February 2003 received authorization from the property department to sell the dachas.
Sosnovka-3 was sold to Veltex, which is part owned by Mikhail Fridman, head of the Alfa Group. The Sosnovka-1 plot was sold to another company, Amelia, which re-sold it to Mikhail Kasyanov.
Kasyanov subsequently found himself at the center of a political storm as a result of the deal, with the Federal Property Department ruling that these deals led to the illegal privatization of state property and filing a suit with the arbitration court.
Although the cases over the two plots were taken up simultaneously, the case over Kasyanov's Sosnovka-1 was eventually suspended at the end of last year. It is due to be examined again by a Moscow court at the start of next month.
Sosnovka-1 stretches over 11.5 hectares on the Moskva River, near the capital, with a private beach. In Soviet times, the land was home to the second secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee, Mikhail Suslov.
Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn lives at nearby Sosnovka-2.
