Page 103 - RusRPTJun19

Collectively, Russian airlines’ Revenue Passenger Kilometers (RPKs) reached 23.26bn in April, Rosaviatsiya said.
Sheremetyevo ranks as the sixth best airport in the world for 2019, passenger rights company AirHelp announced last week. The top three spots for this year are claimed by Doha’s Hamad International Airport, Tokyo Haneda International Airport, and Athens International Airport. The AirHelp rating is determined by calculating on-time performance, service quality, and food and shops. The on-time performance statistics for every airport are calculated by AirHelp to find out how likely it is that a flight will be on time. AirHelp also determines the service quality by asking thousands of people from all around the world about customer service, queues as well as cleanliness at their local airports. Meanwhile, the category of food and shops is reviewed by extensive surveys, by asking thousands of passengers to rate airports’ eating as well as shopping options.
9.1.4 Construction & Real estate sector news
Moscow has the second fastest rising prices for luxury apartments in the world, according to a survey by real estate agent Knight Frank, reports Kommersant on May 30.Knight Frank’s Prime Global Cities Index (PGCI), a quarterly survey of property prices, found that between January and March this year the cost of luxury housing in Moscow increased by 12% compared to the first quarter of 2018. Only the German capital of Berlin has seen a faster increase in prices, which were up 14.1% in the same period. The increase in the absolute cost of luxury accommodation has seen Moscow move up the PGCI ranking to by 34 positions in the last year. According to Knight Frank, the average cost of luxury housing in the primary market now amounts to RUB815,000 per square meter ($12,472).
Housing construction and industry were the two prime growth drivers in April with volumes of the former up by 6.7% y/y (0.6% in March) and industrial production jumping by 4.6% y/y on higher oil and gas output and the calendar factor, reports BCS Global Markets.
However, aggregated construction data showed zero growth y/y last month – a sign that investment activity in the economy remained weak. The trend was also evident in the data on 1Q19 fixed investment that rose only by 0.5% y/y, the lowest growth rate since 3Q16.
The Ministry of Economic Development wants to shut down websites that sell publicly available data on who owns property. On the one hand, this initiative makes sense. The government wants to crack down on publicly available databases like the one used to identify GRU officers last year. Requiring people to get real estate information directly from the government — and making it prohibitively expensive to get large amounts of data — achieves this goal. As a convenient side effect, the bill would also make investigations like Navalny’s more difficult. On the other hand, realtors rely on unofficial property deed data, so the bill would only drive the databases underground. And the bill’s constitutionality is in doubt; the Justice Ministry has a history of shooting down similar bills. The official government registry charges more when people request larger numbers of records. It costs over a million rubles ($15,000) to get 100,000 records, for example. One member of Navalny’s Anti- corruption Foundation worries that the bill’s language — which prohibits the sale of information on property holdings to third parties — would essentially
103 RUSSIA Country Report June 2019 www.intellinews.com