The project is associated with the Innopraktika Foundation, headed by Katerina Tikhonova, the alleged daughter of President Vladimir Putin. About why the technological valley is needed and why it does not lack funding - in the material of "MBH Media".

Science Center at the site of "Shanghai"

On December 29, a new order of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on the allocation of 487 million rubles to Moscow State University appeared on the official Internet portal of legal information. The money will be invested in the Vorobyovy Gory technological valley. The funds from the government reserve fund are far from the largest amount that they plan to spend on the project: in November it became known that 3.6 billion rubles were allocated to the Moscow budget for the construction of a scientific and technological center. In total, according to the rector of Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichy, at the initial stage, the technological valley will require investments in the amount of 20 billion rubles, and in general the project will cost 110 billion.

Construction has not yet begun - in Moscow they are just preparing the site on which the center will be located. At the end of December, the mayor of the capital, Sergei Sobyanin, inspected the site of the future construction site and said that the scientific and technological valley would be erected in Ramenki on the site of "the largest landfill for construction waste." We are talking about the area between Lomonosovsky Avenue, Vernadsky Avenue and Svetlanova Street. It used to house a huge garage cooperative, which Muscovites dubbed "Shanghai". The workers have already begun clearing the site. "There is a lot of work, to put it mildly," - emphasized the Moscow mayor. Earlier, Putin said that the first facilities of Sparrow Hills should be launched in the next two years, and by 2025, when Moscow State University celebrates its 270th anniversary, the entire infrastructure should already be ready. At the same time, it is possible that the terms will once again move: seven years ago Sadovnichy promised that the center would be built in 2020.

The interest of the head of state in the fate of the project is apparently not accidental: the fact is that the Innopraktika Foundation, headed by Katerina Tikhonova, was involved in the development of the concept of the scientific and technological valley - in the press she is called Putin's daughter. At the same time, Tikhonova herself had previously assured that her foundation was far from playing a key role in the work on creating the center. “” Innopraktika ”as a part of Moscow State University participates in this project along with many other structures of the university. But we do not manage, much less do we deal with financial issues, including the methods and sources of financing the project, ”Tikhonova said in 2015 in an interview with Interfax. According to her, the role of Innopraktika is to be “a kind of university interface for building systemic interaction with business”. The task of the Tikhonova foundation was the collection and analysis of opinions and wishes, as well as the presentation of a special commission, which includes more than 80 MSU employees.

The rector of the university Sadovnichy first announced the idea of ​​creating an innovation center on the basis of Moscow State University in the early 2010s, and a few years later the project took on concrete shape. At the same time, according to Tikhonova, the idea of ​​building a technological valley was included in the development program of Moscow State University since the 90s. One way or another, the project is really not new, although it was decided to start its implementation closely only relatively recently.

“We want to build a scientific and technological valley for the first time in Russia and even in the world,” - this is how Sadovnichy told Vladimir Putin about the project in 2015. The scientific and technical center will consist of several clusters: Biomed, Geotech, Engineering, Infotech, Cosmos, Nanotech, as well as interdisciplinary and management clusters. In fact, we are talking about an analogue of Skolkovo - even the legal regime of the project is similar to the one on the basis of which the innovation center in the west of Moscow has been operating for a long time.

Residents of Vorobyovy Gory will be exempted from most taxes for 10 years, including property tax, income tax and VAT. There are other perks as well, including reduced employee insurance premiums and easier recruitment of foreign specialists. According to Sadovnichy, more than 100 companies want to take part in the valley's projects. The main goal of creating a new scientific and technological center, says the rector of Moscow State University, is the development and implementation of technologies that could be in demand among businesses, as well as attracting highly qualified personnel. In a global sense, the project should become a platform for meeting business and science and, according to Sadovnichy, will provide a scientific and technological breakthrough.

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Although the construction of the center has not even begun, it has already found itself in the center of several controversial stories at once. One of them was connected with the demolition of the above-mentioned "Shanghai", where more than eight thousand garages were located. After the idea of ​​building a valley on this site was approved, the owners of the garages were promised to pay compensation - 100 thousand rubles for an iron garage and 200 thousand - for a concrete one. In fact, it turned out not quite so: people complained that garages were being demolished without warning, but they never saw the promised money. The scandal, which the media wrote about, continued for a long time. The first wave of demolition began in the fall of 2015, the second - in the spring of 2018. “We arrived, blocked the entrance and began to open, pull out property and destroy garages,” said the owner of one of the buildings. According to the owners, the demolition was accompanied by looting by the workers.

The second story is connected with a land dispute around the territory of the valley, which became the main reason that its construction did not start for so long. For a long time, the interested parties could not decide who exactly would receive a vacant lot with an area of ​​about 100 hectares, on which a garage cooperative and another landfill were located. According to the documents, he was in unlimited use at the Moscow State University. However, in March 2016, the government introduced the Technological Valley bill, which envisaged the transfer of this piece of land to lease or ownership of a certain management company. The university predictably opposed this initiative. As a result, the document was rewritten and the State Duma adopted it in 2017 - this time without public disputes or discussions. A compromise was found: nevertheless, a specially created management company was entrusted to manage the project, but Moscow State University was its founder.

A new university campus is planned to be built on the territory of the valley, which will include educational buildings, laboratories, museum and administrative buildings, as well as a school for gifted children, a library and even sports centers. Earlier it was reported that it is planned to build hundreds of thousands of square meters of housing on a part of the territory, but these plans are still uncertain.