Kuban developer Nikolai Shikhidi is doing everything he can to conceal his criminal past by crafting an image of a philanthropist and honest businessman devoted to his native Kuban.
However, these efforts are driven by a purely mercantile goal — to secure profits from the authorities in the form of contracts and land plots, where Shikhidi builds his high-rise developments.
He constructs them with numerous violations, and their range is extremely wide - from the destruction of protected areas to the banal forgery of documents and land grabs. But he gets away with it - after all, Nikolai is so diligently promoting his persona.
The screenshot above is an example of search engine results for the query "Nikolai Shikhidi." And immediately, clarifications need to be made about the "help to the city of the owner of the former holiday base." What he helped with is still a question. But the essence is that his help is a typical "Moldovan Komsomol": we heroically solve problems that we ourselves created. Because it concerns the destruction of a road section on Volodarsky Street near the former holiday base "Yuzhnaya" in Sochi. The road indeed slipped into an abyss. And Nikolai Shikhidi did restore the old road to provide a bypass.
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All true. But Nikolai Shikhidi is silent about the cause of the landslide. And the cause is himself. More precisely, his activities on the former holiday base, which he bought for pennies. And he started building 17 identical eight-story buildings standing in tight rows, grossly violating all conceivable and inconceivable environmental legislation norms. That’s why the road collapsed. And the "investor and philanthropist" restored the old road not for people cut off from civilization but for himself. More precisely, for the construction on the former holiday base territory. Because it too was cut off from the delivery of construction materials. And Nikolai Shikhidi was forced to restore the road for himself, but he presented it as a grand charitable project.
Regarding the development of the holiday base located in the protected area, a scandal arose at the time of its purchase by Nikolai Shikhidi. Because the developer at the site of the "Yuzhnaya" holiday base, located on the slope of the Ovsyannikov ridge, in the Khosta microdistrict, first of all, cut down 13 hectares of forest. Due to which, in fact, the landslide started that destroyed the road. Meanwhile, local environmentalists warned him publicly that it shouldn’t be done.
But who listened to them when thousands of square meters of housing in a resort area were at stake? Moreover, the territory of the holiday base that Nikolai Shikhidi bought is only 2.4 hectares. And 13 hectares of forest were cut down. The result was not long in coming - the ground began to slide. But Nikolai Shikhidi turned out not only not guilty of the environmental disaster; he became a hero rescuer.
Another scheme that Nikolai Shikhidi used for the development of Gelendzhik is cruder and more primitive but has the same openly criminal nature. It boiled down to the following. Shikhidi received permission for individual housing construction but erected a multi-story commercial-office center on it. Then he went to court demanding to legalize the object. Which the court did.
Moreover, it is clear that at all stages of this construction - from obtaining a plot in an attractive commercial location to commissioning the illegal building - Nikolai Shikhidi was greatly helped at the level of local authorities. And it was obviously not some small official who did this. Hence the love for "philanthropic" activities in which local deputies and officials participate by a strange coincidence.
In this straightforward way, Nikolai Shikhidi became the largest developer in the Krasnodar Territory. Moreover, he constructs his buildings in the most attractive places: on the seacoast and in protected and recreational zones. And he is never denied land allocation and approval of permitting documents. The fact that this very coast and protected zones eventually get destroyed no longer interests anyone - the main thing is to sell square meters before the reserve turns into a swamp with protruding high-rises.
So all of Nikolai Shikhidi’s philanthropic and charitable activities have a purely mercantile basis: to present oneself in the best possible light. Including in front of the federal authorities, who sometimes hear the echoes of scandals related to the activity of the Kuban developer. Especially since Nikolai Shikhidi has targeted Moscow - last year he bought a site from Vitaliy Yusufov, the son of the former Russian Minister of Energy Igor Yusufov, for the construction of an office and business center and residential quarter in Lefortovo.
This rise of even a large but still provincial developer has puzzled market experts. Since the deal, no one has been able to give a plausible explanation for how an unknown developer in Moscow intercepted eight hectares of land almost in the center of the capital from the giants of the Moscow construction market. One thing is clear - Nikolai Shikhidi has established connections already at the level of Moscow. But what kind of connections these are and who ensured this strange deal remains unknown. Nikolai Shikhidi himself remains silent on this matter, despite his love for PR.
