The Commercial Court of Komi rejected the claim of the Zashchita (‘Protection’) Society for Сonsumer Protection to the regional office of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service for refusing to initiate a case against the Russian Railways Company which had canceled a passenger stop at station Shies, the correspondent of 7x7 reported from the courtroom on February 6.
In June 2019, Russian Railways stopped selling tickets to station Shies, and the train no longer stopped there. It was converted from the passenger station into the technical one. Eco-activists considered the cancellation of the stop illegal and appealed to the office of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service of the Komi Republic. The FAS found no violations and refused to initiate an administrative case against Russian Railways.
A representative of the Komi Federal Anti-Monopoly service said in the Commercial Court that the antimonopoly authority had found out that Russian Railways had declared station Shies unprofitable after having conducted a marketing study:
— There is no need for this station anymore. As far as I know, no one addressed Russian Railways like it was done when it was necessary for starting the transportation of the Technopark employees. If there was a request to open the station and Russian Railways refused to do that, this would be a different point, we would consider it. But no one addressed it.
At the court session, lawyer Lyudmila Parnacheva, the representative of the Zashchita Society for Сonsumer Protection, showed documents that the station was opened at the request of the EkoRailPro Private Company. She proved this with a telegram from Russian Railways, the minutes of the meeting with Pyotr Katsyv, the deputy CEO of Russian Railways, and a letter to Russian Railways from Pyotr Biryukov, the deputy mayor of Moscow, recommending to open the station for the company's employees. Parnacheva showed a document in which the Deputy CEO of the Technopark Company asks the head of the Severnaya Railway to change the train schedule and cancel the scheduled stops at Shies.
— We have attached video recordings. This is a circumstantial evidence that only a limited category of passengers has been transported to station Shies after June 25 and up to now. For example, there are about 10 video on which about 50 people including nine police officers were brought there by construction trains on October 1 to 4, — Lyudmila Parnacheva told the court.
Representatives of Russian Railways and the Federal Passenger Company said that they had never seen these videos before, so they could not comment on it. They did not watch them in court, as it "was not initially the subject of examination in the FAS".
After a half-hour break, judge Sergey Paniotov recognized the refusal of the Federal Anti-Monopoly service of the Komi Republic to initiate an administrative case against Russian Railways legal.
Residents of Arkhangelsk Oblast and the Komi Republic have been preventing illegal construction of landfill for Moscow garbage at station Shies near the border of these two regions for more than a year. Activists organized a round-the-clock watch, launched a large-scale information campaign, went through conflicts with security guards of the facility and numerous trials. The intermediate result of the confrontation is that the Moscow authorities have not included Shies in the new territorial waste management scheme. The Arkhangelsk Commercial Court recognized the buildings for the landfill illegal and ordered to demolish them.
