Chelyabinsk Region and Rosselkhozbank decided to prolong their cooperation agreement by five years; all the papers to this extent were signed by Governor Petr Sumin and the bank’s chairman Yuri Trushin on March 20, 2007. Mr. Trushin says the bank provided the region with two times more money than stated in their previous five-year arrangement; it invested about 3bn RUR in the South Ural agricultural development last year alone, mainly in the form of development loans to both large enterprises and small farms and in the form of mortgages. Rosselkhozbank intends to invest at least 12bn RUR in

RosBusinessConsulting published its rating of most rapidly developing banks in 2006. URSA Bank’s position was determined by the combined ratings of its predecessors (Uralvneshtorgbank and SibAcademBank). According to the information agency, URSA Bank was rated 12th on Russia’s Top100 list in terms of net wealth and capital growth, 13th in terms of giving loans to legal entities, and 11th in terms of amount of legal entities accounts. The bank was even more successful on the retail market: it was rated Russia’s 6th most dynamically developing bank in terms of consumer lending growth last year

‘At the moment, the company sees increasing the number of scheduled flights and cutting back on the number of chartered ones as one of its strategic challenges. Ural carriers are starting to give up practices of letting one travel agent book the whole airplane and are now trying to offer blocks of seats on scheduled flights to a few travel companies at a time. Most of the world’s major airlines prefer to focus on scheduled flights, since they are so much more convenient for passengers,’ Commercial Director of Ural Airlines Kirill Skuratov said to UrBC. ‘One can buy a ticket for a scheduled

Sverdlovsk Region Duma deputies approved of amendments to the regional budget proposed by Governor Eduard Rossel on March 20, 2007, which resulted in raising the revenues by 9.805 billion RUR. The total budget now amounts to 88.111 billion RUR, with the budget expenditures estimated at 92.256 billion, or 13.949 billion more than prior to the amendments. 37% of these extra revenues will be invested in socially important fields, 42% will be transferred to municipal bodies. Additional 2.3 billion RUR, 2.4 billion RUR and 330 million RUR will be spent on healthcare, pay rise to civil servants (a

‘The new woods-management system states that all of those based in Sverdlovsk Region will have to become unitary state enterprises by the end of 2007,’ says Head of Sverdlovsk Region Forestry Konstantin Kryuchkov. Mr. Kryuchkov believes this will allow the state to keep at least 4,500 vacancies in the region’s rural areas. These unitary enterprises might be able to provide municipal bodies and state entities with wood and firewood for their own use. The regional woods-management system will be made up of 35 forestry units with 10 to 12 people working in each of them. Two people will be

‘Our supermarkets offer round about seven kinds of apples imported from Poland (Aport, Alva, Champion, Gloucester, and some others); we always ask for an obligatory safety certificate when buying them,’ the merchandiser of Kupets supermarket chain Marina Gints said to UrBC. Rosselkhoznadzor (the state agricultural watchdog) has recently prevented some Poland-grown fruits and vegetables from being imported to Russia as they were reported to have a lot of pesticides in them. The shipment to Saint Petersburg, consisting of 16.5 tons of cabbage and 19.3 tons of apples, had extremely high cadmium

The opening ceremony of the 8th All-Russian energy-saving conference organized by Sverdlovsk Region Government, the Russian Federation Ministry for Industry and Power Engineering, Federal Power Engineering Agency, the Union of Russian Entrepreneurs and Manufacturers, and Ural division of Russian Academy of Sciences took place in Yekaterinburg today. The conference will be attended by presenters from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, and Moscow regions as well as from Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and Udmurtia. Deputy Minister for Industry, Power Engineering, and Science Yuri Shevelev

Rostechnadzor (the state environmental and technological safety watchdog) is going to inspect the largest enterprises based in Sverdlovsk Region on March 20-30, 2007. Following the order of Head Konstantin Pulikovskiy, Rostechnadzor’s experts will have to examine just how effectively the management of these enterprises complies with the technological and environmental safety requirements, reports Rostechnadzor’s press officer in Ural Federal District. The agency is to inspect the following companies: Magnesite, Chelyabinsk; Svyatogor, Krasnouralsk; Metallurgical Industrial Complex of

‘Koltsovo airport runways must be renovated for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. The Russian Federation Department of Transport now has to decide whether to extend the second runway to 3.5 kilometers or to put up a new four-kilometer-long one. It would cost 30 billion RUR to construct the third runway and 10 billion RUR to improve the second one. We also need a roomier airplane parking lot since the airport will have to host 180 planes at a time during the summit. So far, the airport has had to withstand its greatest load during the United Russia Party congress; some flights had

RENOVA Stroy Group management held negotiations with investors and developers attracted by the company’s Academic construction project at the international conference known as MIPIM 2007 that was held in Cannes, France, on March 13-16, 2007, reports the spokesperson for the company. The international businesses appeared to be interested in joint projects in the field of commercial estate. At the exhibition, RENOVA Stroy Group presented three large commercial projects to be based in the future district of Yekaterinburg, namely, a logistics center (60,000 square meters ready to be commissioned

‘Insolvency of HydroSpetsStroy Ltd. (general contractor of Noviy Grad, the local developer) declared by the Court of Arbitration means that all of the company’s assets will be sold by auction. The money will be used to pay off debts,’ reports company’s acting trustee in bankruptcy Olga Rushitskaya. ‘The company’s creditors now have full control of the assets, so they will be able to sell everything,’ she says. HydroSpetsStroy Ltd. now has to undergo bankruptcy proceedings with Olga Rushitskaya as their trustee in bankruptcy. Ms Rushitskaya has to hold a meeting of the company’s creditors and