Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) is going to put up a plant meant for producing automobile pressings in Saint Petersburg. The solemn laying-of-the-foundation-stone ceremony took place on December 21, 2007. The event was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Governor of Saint Petersburg Valentina Matvienko, and MMK’s Chairman Viktor Rashnikov. Mr. Rashnikov noted that the future plant would deal in full-cycle production of body parts and subunits for automobiles that would be totally comparable with their best foreign counterparts. He also thanked Mr. Putin and Ms Matvienko

According to the Central Bank of Russia, volume of for-profit self-regulatory organizations’ deposits in SberInvestBank valid for 1 to 3 years went down by 21.9% (from 21 million RUR to 16.4 million RUR) in January-November 2007.

Moody’s Investors Service raised SKB-Bank’s B2/Not Prime deposit rating outlook in terms of both ruble and foreign currency deposits from Stable to Positive. The bank’s financial stability rating was confirmed at E+ with the Stable outlook. At the same time, Moody's Interfax (controlled by Moody’s Investors Service) promoted SKB-Bank’s long-term credit rating from Baa1.ru to A3.ru. The new improved ratings and rating outlooks stem from SKB-Bank’s better position on Sverdlovsk Region market and its gradual expansion into the nearby regions as well as the good quality of its assets,

Central Bank of Russia reports volume of loans given by UralTransBank to natural persons for 181 days to 1 year went down by 38.3% (from 339.241 million RUR to 209.303 million RUR).

URSA Bank signed an acquiring agreement with Chudodom chain stores. The chain’s thirteen stores based in Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Kemerovo, and Yekaterinburg are going to get thirty-one POS terminals that will handle cards like Visa Int., MasterCard Int., and Gold Crown, the bank’s press officer reports. Incidentally, URSA Bank started processing bank cards in Sibvez chain stores (forty-eight outlets in Siberian Federal District) and Jewelry 585 chain stores (forty-one outlets in Siberian Federal District) in November 2007. Chudodom owns twenty-five retail outlets selling a range of household

Uralmash Machine Building Corporation and ChMK (part of Mechel Group) signed a strategic partnership agreement regarding the upgrade of ChMK’s metallurgical equipment in 2008-2010. The spokesperson for the corporation reports the two parties appear to be interested in a number of joint projects related to modernization of metallurgical machinery and manufacturing of spare parts for blast furnace, steel-smelting, and rolled metal production shops and oxygen-converter plants. For one, the two companies are planning to restore CC machine No. 2 and blast furnaces No. 3 and No. 5, and to come up

'Sberbank and VTB’s IPOs have definitely become this year’s highlights, whereas the impact of a major mortgage crisis in the U.S. was the Russian bank’s worst nightmare,’ says Andrei Emelyanov, the Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s Strategic Development Director. 'Fortunately, this crisis has not affected the regional banks too badly, and our bank was no exception. This year, the Urals have experienced a sort of ‘invasion’ by the banks from other parts of Russia,’ he adds. 'As for the Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development, this year will probably be

The value of net assets of Energy - Mixed Investments (the unit investment trust) managed by Eurogreen Management Company Ltd. went down by 6.45% between December 14, 2007 and December 17, 2007. According to Eurogreen’s website, the company’s net assets decreased from 3,674,402.03 RUR on December 14, 2007 to 3,437,540.33 RUR on December 17, 2007.

Russian Copper Company coordinated an exhibition of Russian copper castings that date back to the 12th to the 20th century. The exhibition, located in Yekaterinburg, features 400 items, most of which are portrayals of various saints. The opening ceremony took place in the Cathedral-on-Blood on St. Nicholas’s Day. All the exhibits come from Russian Copper Company’s collection, supervised by the Central Museum of Old Russian Culture and Art in Moscow. Visitors can attend the exhibition from 9 AM to 20 PM beginning from December 20, 2007.

Over the nine months that Aston Group and Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank’s joint mortgage program has been running, no mortgager has moved in in their apartment yet. According to the company’s website, even the first part of Aston Group’s housing complex in Yekaterinburg’s Zheleznodorozhniy district has been completed yet. The mortgage program was launched in March 2007.

Nizhniy Tagil Iron & Steel Works (part of Evraz Group) has successfully finished testing the dust-exhaust system of its first converter; the latter underwent an overhaul and was launched in November 2007 as part of the company’s four-year steel-smelting equipment upgrade project. The enterprise’s environmental experts had been gauging the machine’s conservation system’s performance for seventy-two hours and came to a conclusion that upgrading the first converter resulted in cutting down on atmospheric emissions by 2.5 times (from 200 milligrams per cubic meter of air to 80 milligrams per