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International Internet Magazine. Baltic States news & analytics Friday, 29.03.2024, 07:09

Estonia starts making purchase offers to owners of land under border strip

BC, Tallinn, 16.11.2015.Print version
The Estonian Interior Ministry has begun to deliver personal offers to landowners in southeastern Estonia whose land plot may be needed for the construction of facilities on the Estonian-Russian border, reports LETA.

"We've prepared 30 letters with personal offers and at the moment employees of the Police and Border Guard Board are delivering them personally to the landowners," spokesman for the Interior Ministry Toomas Viks told BNS on Friday.

 

Thirty-two more letters are in the final stages of completion and 37 are being drafted now, Viks added.

 

The personal offer signed by Interior Minister Hanno Pevkur comes with all necessary documents and forms so that the transaction could be concluded as quickly as possible in case of the landowner's positive answer. The landowners have two weeks to respond.

 

Viks said there was also some room for bargaining in the present offers.

 

If a landowner rejects the ministry's offer, the land plot will be subject to expropriation, presumably for a lower price than shown in the offer by the ministry because the size of the compensation in the event of expropriation will be established considering the negative effect that the strict restrictions applying to the use of the piece of land have on its market value.

 

The government needs to buy land plots situated next to the 136-kilometer section of the border between Estonia and Russia in southeastern Estonia from 99 private owners. The government is planning to put up a fence at least two meters high complete with a barrier for wild animals and a sand strip on a little more than one hundred kilometers of the border.

 

No fence will be built in swampy areas and places otherwise difficult to access.

 

The Interior Ministry has commissioned an evaluation of all the land plots from a licensed real estate company. Tonu Hunt, adviser to the border guard policy department at the Interior Ministry, told the Maaleht rural weekly last week that the ministry is offering landowners a price pegged to the property's compensation value, which takes into consideration the condition of the property, its location, the investments made, the value of forest on the property and other similar factors.

 

Designing of the border facilities will end next spring, by which time deforestation of the border strip should also be completed. Building of the border facilities will start next year and continue in 2017, when the installation of surveillance equipment and other equipment will start.






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