Baikal's Sale: Journalists Discover Whose Interests Are Behind the Controversial Bill Legalizing Clear-Cutting Around the Unique Lake

Half-hour documentary film People of Baikal released a report about this.

It concerns amendments to the Law on the Protection of Lake Baikal, which permit logging until 2030 and the removal of land from forest reserves and its transfer to private ownership by the end of 2025. The amendments were sponsored by 14 deputies and seven senators.

Baikal's defenders are confident that hotel complexes will appear in place of the forests.It turned out that many of them [the authors of the amendments] are connected with companies that make money from timber, construction, real estate and tourism.", investigators say.

In particular, the senator from Andrey Chernyshev of the Irkutsk region was the owner of a development company. The family of another senator from the same region Sergei Brilka and now runs a construction business, his son Ivan Brilka «regularly wins tenders for government contracts, although there aren't always other participants in the tenders"The senator himself had previously participated in the company "Sigmatet", convicted of illegal logging and mining near Lake Baikal.

To the deputy's family Sergei Ten belongs to the group of companies "Labor", which became a monopoly in the field of road construction in the Irkutsk region. Deputy Alexander Yakubovsky through his wife Olga Yakubovskaya acts as a beneficiary of "Baikal Construction and Development Group».

More information about the persons involved in the investigation and their assets can be found directly from the film.

The head is actively lobbying for the amendments Buryatia Alexander Tsydenov, who convinces local residents that current legislation infringes on their rights by preventing the construction of roads and infrastructure. He also presented the project to investors in September 2021. tourist complex: "It's beautiful, it's interesting, it's tasty, it's healthy, it's definitely profitable.».

Protecting the lake is becoming increasingly difficult—current legislation makes it easy to label activists as foreign agents and traitors, and environmental groups as undesirable.