World Wildlife Fund Russia and Greenpeace have written an open letter to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to protest against truckmaker KamAz's purchase of the territory of a national park in central Russia.
"As a result of the violations of the law there has been created a threat to the integrity of the national park Nizhnyaya Kama, because KamAz is going to sell the disputed territories to third parties," WWF Russia Environmental Rights Coordinator Yekaterina Khmelyova said.
According to Russian law, national parks belong to the state and cannot be privatized.
Last year, KamAz registered several strips of land within Nizhnyaya Kama as its own territory, saying they belonged to it before the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
"We got back what belonged to us before the beginning of the 1990s," a KamAz spokesman said.
The park occupies about 500 hectares of land in the valley of the River Kama in the republic of Tatarstan.
MOSCOW, December 3 (RIA Novosti)
