‘Yesterday’s meeting of the Federal Insurance Surveillance Agency committee resulted in UralTransBank and ROSNO, the insurance company, reaching some sort of an agreement, namely, the parties decided that UralTransBank would once again produce all the papers related to their insurance claim on January 22, 2007. ROSNO, on its part, would take the final decision (whether to pay the money or motivate the refusal to do so in each particular case) on January 29, 2007,’ reports Olga Maslennikova, Vice President of the Association of Regional Russian Banks.

The dispute originally started when the two companies accused each other of failing to meet the terms of their general agreement regarding credit risk insurance related to consumer loans. UralTransBank claimed that ROSNO had not been paying them any bad debt compensation since April 2006; the insurer said the bank had failed to produce all the documents needed to confirm the cases in question as insured events. The conflict came to be regarded as scandalous after both companies engaged in spreading negative rumors about each other. This led to mass media and extraneous entities becoming massively involved in the clash.

‘Should this fail to help work things out, Rosstrakhnadzor (Russia’s state insurance policy watchdog) will have to believe ROSNO fails to fulfill its orders,’ Ms Maslennikova said.

In spite of all the efforts made to reach a consensus, both parties preferred to have the right to appeal to court for possible hearing.