'Some officers from the regional public prosecution authorities and from Sverdlovsk Region Department of Internal Affairs conducted a search of the Main Architectural Administration in the building of the city council on July 3, 2007. These twenty or so people managed to virtually paralyze the land allotment department,’ the spokesperson for the city council Konstantin Pudov said to a UrBC reporter.

'The officers withdrew about 100 files on land allotments. We don’t quite understand what the authorities actually meant to do, as we have always provided all the data needed voluntarily. As it happens, Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy is in Moscow at the moment, so this rummaging might have had to do with creating some sort of informational hullabaloo and hurting the council rather than getting some papers,’ Mr. Pudov observed.