Anger as Siberian city buys £220,000 Christmas tree

RESIDENTS of a Siberian city have hit out at corruption after authorities bought a £220,000 “hi-tech” Christmas tree made from steel and thousands of LED lights.

The 80ft artificial tree in Kemerovo, a city surrounded by coal mines, cost 18 million roubles, three times more than the tree installed in the Kremlin.

Ivan Urgant, a comedian who hosts a programme on the popular Channel One station, ridiculed the tree as having “very expensive ornaments – real rabbits, bears, cars and planes”, and hinted at corruption in the city hall.

The city made national headlines last winter when residents reported seeing black snow due to large amounts of coal dust, while a town nearby covered a snow hill used for sledding with white paint to hide the coal residue.

“Here, people don’t really live, they survive. And they are spending 18 million on a tree!” wrote Roman Khabibulin, a local resident, on the VK social media network.

“It’s as stupid as buying the latest iphone when your children have nothing to eat,” wrote a fellow user of VK, Ivan Lebedev.

Online commentators suggested authorities should instead have spent the money on subsidised housing or to fund cancer services for children.

However, the mayor of Kemerovo defended the purchase as a “midrange” technological tree to replace an older model that was too expensive to repair. The new tree was made of steel and had 239,000 LED lights, he said.

Sibevrostroy, the company that supplied the tree, denied the price was inflated. “This product cannot be called a tree,” Andrei Zorin, a director of the company, told Interfax, the news agency. “It’s a hi-tech multimedia complex which happens to look like a tree.”

Alexander Yushchenko, a Communist Party spokesman, said the tree was “just an element of the whole system, our national problem, corruption”.

‘This product cannot be called a tree … It’s a hi-tech multimedia complex which happens to look like a tree’