Poland demands $6 million from Russia for use of buildings in Warsaw
The District Court in Warsaw has ordered Russia to pay 9 million Polish zlotys ($2.3 million) for use of a building on Bobrowiecka Street in the Mokotów district, Polish web site of wyborcza.pl reported.
The Treasury and City Hall made an accusation against Russia that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs used the building from 2009 to 2015 "without concluding a contract." As the newspaper notes, the defendant did not appear at the court session, which allowed the court, on the basis of the civil procedural code, to accept the plaintiff's statements as true.
Russia uses a large number of buildings in Poland for diplomatic needs; they are largely buildings built during the USSR. According to the Polish side, Russia has no contracts for some of this the real estate. There are six such buildings in Warsaw.
In early April, a court in Warsaw ordered Russia to pay 7.6 million zlotys (about $2 million) for the use of a non-contracted estate on Kielecka Street. In this case, the decision was also taken in absentia.
In addition, in November 2016, the District Court in Warsaw ordered Russia to pay $2 million for using the building on Sobieski Street. This building was used without a contract from 2012 to 2015, the Polish authorities claimed. In the 1970s, employees of the Foreign Ministry lived in the building on Sobieski Street, but it has been nearly abandoned since the 1990s, the newspaper writes.
Commenting on the claims of the Polish authorities, the spokeswoman for the Russian diplomatic mission in the Republic, Valeria Perginsky, stated that "these issues are being discussed in Russian-Polish talks at the level of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the two countries."
"We proceed from the premise that all land plots were leased out to our premises on the basis of relevant bilateral agreements, and all the diplomatic real estate located on these sites was either built by the Soviet side with its own money or legally acquired," the Russian ambassador to Poland, Sergey Andreyev, said to TASS news agency.