MOSCOW, May 23 (RIA Novosti) – A new parliamentary center will be built in central Moscow, presidential property management administration chief Vladimir Kozhin said on Thursday.
The idea of building a parliamentary compound to house both the upper and lower houses as well as their administrative and support services, which are currently scattered around Moscow at over 10 locations, has been considered for a while. The project was put on hold, however, due to the financial crisis.
The location for the center will be announced in the very near future, Kozhin said.
“It is a place worthy of a parliamentary center of a country such as Russia,” he said.
In 2011, when the Russian president proposed expanding Moscow’s city boundaries to include a “metropolitan federal district,” a representative of the lower house, the State Duma, said a new parliamentary center for the upper house, the Federal Assembly, would be built just outside Moscow within five years.
Last week Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin said he was against the idea of a parliamentary center being built in “New Moscow,” i.e. outside Moscow’s Outer Ring Road, known as the MKAD.
He said the parliamentary complex should be located in downtown Moscow and a decision to that effect was about to be announced by President Vladimir Putin.