‘96 people, headed by V. Zolotarev, refused to go up the ground after their shift was over at Krasnaya Shapochka mine (part of Severouralsk Bauxite Mine, aka SUBR) on March 26, 2008. These miners are still under the ground and are thus preventing the other shifts and mine sections from operating. The ongoing strike made SUBR management halt the other mines’ work for the time being,’ says a statement made by Russia’s Ore and Mining Trade Union’s Central Council and signed by the union’s chairperson M. Tarasenko. The Council reports they consider the strikers’ actions to be a selfish

According to the National Managers’ League’s profitability ranking of unit investment trusts as of March 28, 2008, the share price of BCS Bank Stock Fund (BrokerCreditService Management Company) has gone down by 19.56% since the beginning of the year.

Nashi Dengi, the financial magazine, coordinated some free information workshops for all those willing to come; the event (part of the magazine’s educational project targeted at Russian provinces and improving the quality of life there), known as Financial Literacy Days, was held at the Ural State University’s Assembly Hall. Reports were made by experts from the area’s leading banks and investment companies, including those presented by Sberbank’s Ural branch’s acting Securities Director Alexander Vasilyev and Private Loans Director Svetlana Galanova. Over one hundred workshop attendants were

The Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s new VISA Olympics offer will be available from April 1, 2008 to May 31, 2008. To use the new offer, one only needs to pay for one’s purchases by a Visa card (the sum of the transaction must come to at least 500 RUR); you can’t use the offer if you use your card to withdraw cash from an ATM or a bank outlet. On June 18, 2008, the drawing of lottery prizes for the Russian citizens who’ve used their cards will be organized. The lottery participants will be given a chance to win one hundred gym bags and five main prizes: trips for two to the

March and April are traditionally the time when banks publish their annual reports for the previous year, while the country’s leading media usually spend some time analyzing these reports. URSA Bank, for example, was rated Russia’s 17th largest bank in terms of net asset volume (as of January 1, 2008) by RosBusinessConsulting, Forbes, and Kommersant-Dengi. In addition, Dengi gave the bank the 18th position in Russia’s largest banks rating based on the volume of the banks’ own funds. According to RosBusinessConsulting’s rating of Best Deposit Banks, URSA Bank was given the 12th position in

Nikolai Krupinin, Deputy Head of Ural Federal District’s division of Rostechnadzor (the state environmental, technological, and nuclear safety watchdog) chaired a meeting on the results of checking VIZ Stal’s compliance with the existing conservational and environmental regulations. The enterprise was inspected in this respect between February 11, 2008 and March 6, 2008, the spokesperson for Ural Federal District’s division of Rostechnadzor says. It was revealed in the course of the inspection that the enterprise was guilty of some grave environmental offenses, therefore VIZ Stal was ordered

URSA Bank’s Yekaterinburg subsidiary won the first prize in the Best Personal Savings Program category at the Lending and Investment Quality Festival in Yekaterinburg on March 26-28, 2008. The event was coordinated by Quality Guarantee, the innovational technologies center, with some support from Yekaterinburg Consumer Rights Committee. There were twelve all-Russian, regional, and local banks with offices in Yekaterinburg that attended the festival altogether. Apart from the first prize, a number of URSA Bank’s products received some honorary diplomas: the bank’s Holiday deposit got a diploma

Sverdlovsk Region’s Government thanked SKB-Bank’s management for the company’s great contribution to organization and coordination of Russian Expo Arms-2007, the International Exposition of Armament, Defense Technologies and Ammunition, the bank’s press officer reports. First Deputy Head of Sverdlovsk Region Government for Economic Policies and Prospective Development and the region’s Minister for Economics and Labor Mikhail Maximov expressed his genuine gratitude to the bank for the company’s willingness to cooperate, which adds to the country’s defense capabilities as well as to the Urals’

‘We got about 8,000 complaints from the city’s dwellers last year, and some 200 complains came from travelers; however, we only handled the cases which could not be settled out of court,’ Chairman of Yekaterinburg Consumer Rights Committee Andrei Artemiev said to UrBC. Mr. Artemiev says he wouldn’t be able to single out one travel agent that did a particularly bad job: rather, the number of claims was directly proportional to the number of an agent’s customers. ‘On the legal side of the issue, travelers have to beware of the so-called time-sharing terms, when a customer’s tour only covers