Press: housing programme, Minsk

Headline block

725 Wohnungen in „weltrekord-verdächtiger Zeit“ fertiggestellt

Neustädter Ingenieur als „Watchman“ auf Großbaustelle bei Minsk

Wolfram Götz arbeitet für deutsche Konsulting-Firmen in GUS-Ländern

Von Gerhard Wolf

In English: “725 apartments completed in world-record-suspicious time — Engineer from Neustadt as ‘Watchman’ on a large construction site near Minsk. Wolfram Götz works for German consulting firms in the CIS states. By Gerhard Wolf.”

What the report describes

The article describes the construction of a housing estate near Minsk in Belarus, built under the German federal housing programme for members of the Russian armed forces withdrawing from Germany. Construction was carried out by a Turkish contractor; according to the report, around 2,700 workers were on site. On behalf of German consulting firms, Götz supervised the construction work as well as drawing approval and invoice verification — a role the report captures with the word “Watchman”.

Other points raised in the report: communication on site ran initially in Russian and increasingly in English; the economic conditions were shaped by inflation and unreliable material supply; and provisioning the site required arrangements outside the regular supply chains. The report also mentions a planned expansion to several dozen major projects across the states of the former Soviet Union.

[Large parts of the body text cannot be read reliably from the scan. The account above reflects only what could be deciphered with confidence; individual figures in the report — including the number of planned major projects — are not unambiguous in the scan and are therefore not quoted here.]