A St. Petersburg resident paid eight million roubles for an apartment, renovated it, and then discovered he could not remove the previous occupant, according to the Telegram channel Mash.
Once renovation was complete, an elderly man arrived and presented documents showing he held a permanent, irrevocable right to live in the flat. The right dated to the privatisation era of the 1990s, when the pensioner had waived his ownership share in favour of the seller in exchange for a lifelong residency guarantee.
The seller advised the buyer to simply befriend the old man and treat him as family, then disappeared. Police told the victim they could not help, and property experts quoted by Mash said the law is on the pensioner’s side, making a court remedy equally unlikely.
Real estate experts said such cases have become common because sellers use every available means to hide information about these permanent residents from buyers.
The scheme is described as a successor to a fraud pattern linked to the so-called Dolinaya case, in which Russia’s Supreme Court recently ruled that a transaction can be voided only if the buyer knew the seller was acting under the influence of fraudsters.
