A senior Krasnodar lawmaker died in a weekend car crash as he was traveling home from the opening of the first casino in a new gambling zone, an accident that promises to raise new concerns about a government decision to limit legalized gambling to four remote areas.
Nikolai Kotlyarov, speaker of the Krasnodar city legislature, and his driver were killed on the spot when their Toyota Camry crashed into a car parked on the roadside of the Krasnodar-Eisk Highway at about 1 a.m. Sunday and slammed into a guardrail, Interfax reported.
Kotlyarov was among about 500 people who attended the opening of the Oracle casino in Azov City, a Rostov region gambling zone located about 200 kilometers from Krasnodar and 100 kilometers from Rostov-on-Don, the nearest sizable city.
It's unclear how many people will be eager to travel long distances for a gambling excursion, but the casino's operators said they were convinced that there is a market and they plan to start building a four-star hotel for gamblers this summer.
"There's a lot of gambling people here" in the region, said Valery Saparin, marketing director for casino operator Royal Time. "We hope that a lot of people will be drawn to us in the near future."
The casino, in a large shed-like building in a snowy field, has about 200 slot machines and 10 table games. Only about 100 of the visitors appeared to be actually placing bets Saturday.
Casinos and slot-machine halls were closed across the country July 1 under a government plan to limit gambling to Azov City, the Kaliningrad exclave, the Altai region in Siberia and the Primorye region in the Far East.
The car crash highlights a risk of placing casinos in the remote zones, and it draws new attention to Russia's dangerous roads. President Dmitry Medvedev has described the high road-accident rate as a national problem and resolved to make roads safer.
Investigators said Sunday that they believed that a violation of traffic safety rules was responsible for Kotlyarov's accident and had opened an investigation, Interfax reported.
Kotlyarov, 72, was born in the Krasnodar region and had served as speaker of the city legislature since 2005.
(MT, AP)