Ghost town abandoned again

Take note – story published 9 years ago

The auction for the abandoned former Soviet military radar-locator outside of the central Kurzeme province town of Skrunda was declared null and void after the latest winning bidder, this time local real estate developer Kurzemes nekustamie īpašumi, again failed to make the first down payment to secure the deal’s closing, reported national information agency LETA Tuesday.

“We’ve made a detailed inventory of the place and concluded that it has been significantly plundered and absolutely does not meet up to the assessments declared in the valuation. There is nothing left of the boiler-house, all of the cement road slabs have been carried away. The property is in ruins. What was on offer in the auction and shown in the photographs absolutely doesn’t correspond with reality on the ground. In my view, the property needs to be reassessed,” explained the real estate firm’s board chair Marina Ķēniņa.

The opportunity to acquire the now-abandoned and largely plundered city that used to house the thousands of Soviet military and technical-scientific support staff and their families now passes to second-highest bidder Capital Investment Group, which had offered €402,000 and has two weeks to stake its claim to the purchase.

The property is currently assessed at €12,000 and is under the administration of the Skrunda local district government, which trying to claw back debts from a chain of former dead-beat bidders in prior auctions in the failed series.

The property consists of about 45 hectares of land holding ten apartment buildings, three registration offices, three transformer sub-stations, a food shore, club, sports hall, water tower, three warehouses, three administrative buildings, a security guard’s booth, three barracks buildings, two cafeterias, two boiler houses, an auto-mechanics training garage, 32 garages, water pumping station and many other kinds of declared technical inventory.

The main structure around which the support town grew up was the radio-locator station, which was symbolically imploded before the world community in 1995 as a goodbye gesture to the Russian army forces remaining within Latvia’s national  territory.

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