Alexander Jakob, First Deputy Mayor of Yekaterinburg, has recently conducted a meeting devoted to town planning prospects in 2007. The main point on the agenda concerned the prospective network of trunk roads. There are thrice as many cars in the city today as in 1900; the total length of the urban roads comes to 880.1 kilometers, which is obviously not enough. The improvement committee is planning to construct another 44.2 kilometers of roads in the near future, including nine interchanges; in addition, a number of streets is to be restored. Pulvimixer is still to be used as the primary

‘Koltsovo airport of Yekaterinburg is trying to impugn our order regarding the airport’s refusal to provide Ural Airlines with the slots for winter flights from Yekaterinburg to Moscow and back,’ says the spokesperson for Federal Antimonopoly Service in Sverdlovsk Region. The Service earlier stated that Kotsovo airport had been violating the antimonopoly law when refusing the carrier the so-called historic slots in winter. The airport said back then that due to overhaul of check-in zones 1 and 2 and leasing of zones 5 and 6 meant for domestic flights they couldn’t service too many passengers

‘Our regional division received a large number of complaints regarding bank loans; a great part of these complaints concerned Russian Standard Bank,’ Elena Bogacheva of Rospotrebnadzor (the state consumer rights watchdog) in Sverdlovsk Region announced at a recent press conference. ‘This company is now involved in an administrative suit; we’ve asked the bank for a number of documents in order to analyze the data and support or refute the claim as to their violating consumer rights,’ Ms Bogacheva said. ‘One can name the most common complaints that the borrowers come up with: unscrupulous ways

Regional division of Rospotrebnadzor (the state consumer rights watchdog) received 5,337 complaints in writing and 23,000 complaints altogether in 2006. All of last year’s claims amounted to approximately 84 million RUR, Vladimir Gurvich (M.D. and Deputy Chief State Sanitary Inspector in Sverdlovsk Region) announced at a press conference. ‘Our inspections resulted in withdrawing 25 million RUR worth of goods last year; besides, they revealed 14 million RUR worth of low-quality services,’ he said. ‘Our regional division provided 7,000 pieces of professional advice and conducted over 7,000

‘The local mortgage lending market is likely to undergo even more changes in the nearest future. For one, the increase in demand for loans taken to buy places in the suburbs of the city will soon slow down or stop altogether. The potential borrowers’ income makes it impossible for them to acquire a dwelling even on a mortgage; besides, the demand has been affected by some realtors setting unfairly high prices. An apartment, for example, may be offered for 3.2 million RUR whereas it really costs 2.7 million,’ Nikolai Gunchenko of Gunchenko & Co. Real Estate Ltd. said to UrBC. Sverdlovsk

Severnaya Kazna, one of the local banks, explained the idea behind the recent redistribution of shares among the company’s shareholders via the corporate website. (Members of the Board of Directors Pavel Chernavin and Rais Garifulin, the bank’s second largest and fourth largest shareholders respectively, have recently sold their 19% and 5% share holdings). The company’s online forum placed a notice on the changes in the shareholder structure signed by Chairman Andrei Volchik. Mr. Volchik observes that these changes have to do with the differing interests of the bank’s major shareholders, that

‘I believe one should be very careful with the idea of setting up a few more Auchan supermarkets in Sverdlovsk Region; the same applies to any large supermarkets in general. The thing is, it is quite dangerous trying to catch up with the West on the number of square meters of trade areas per 1,000 citizens without taking into account any other factors,’ Alexei Podolyako of Alliance Non-Commercial Partnership said to UrBC. The management of Auchan was reported to mention their intention of setting up four or five new supermarkets in the region in the course of a meeting with Governor Eduard

The licensing department of Russian Federation Federal Tourism Agency is going to set up the Federal Register of all travel agents. ‘We have received no applications so far, but I suppose all the agents will be able to apply in time,’ says Vladimir Strzhalkovskiy, Agency CEO. The new legislation states registering is now obligatory for all travel agents; according to this law, the travel agents must bear certain financial responsibility for their services; it also clarifies the ways and methods of state control over them as well as provides some new legal terms and explains how the services

A conference devoted to joint mortgage project of Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank and Aston Group was held in Yekaterinburg on March 14, 2007. The mortgage scheme is going to be available beginning from March 2007. The event was attended by the bank’s Chairman Alexander Ivanov, the U.S. Consul General in Yekaterinburg John Stepanchuk, Aston Group Chairman Vyacheslav Trapesnikov, and some reporters. The agenda of the conference covered some general issues as well as those devoted to problems connected with mortgage loans, mortgages for new buildings, and the cooperation prospects of Sverdlovsk

According to the annual report of the Interstate Aviation Committee for 2006, there were 33 air crashes in the countries joining the intergovernmental Agreement on Civil Aviation and Air Space Use last year. Ural Airlines had no accidents in 2006, reports their press officer. The data given in this report can be further proved by JACDEC (the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre) research findings: they say Ural Airlines is one of Russia’s safest carriers. JACDEC has been investigating air crashes and publishing annual reports on the global carriers’ safety level since 1973. Normally,