The construction of a business center and a mall in Koltsovskiy highway, Yekaterinburg, still hasn’t begun. In the meantime, these buildings are part of the preparation program for the next year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Yekaterinburg.

Point & Co’s First Deputy GD Yuri Tsepernyat explained in the course of a meeting at Sverdlovsk Region’s government house that they were currently busy re-designing the buildings.

‘We had to do this because of the local farmers. We did manage to buy a few nearby land allocations and turn them into two four-hectare construction sites, but we were unable to buy the little bits of private estate in-between,’ he said.

As a result, the developer had to split the original single block in two, which meant they had to come up with a new project and put off the start of the construction process. ‘We have already signed an agreement with a design institute that will design two separate buildings for us. All the papers will have been ready by September 2008,’ Yuri Tsepernyat noted.

‘This means that these buildings won’t be finished by next year’s summit,’ Governor Eduard Rossel observed.