‘Because of the financial crisis, Pnevmostroymachina will have to make 10% of its staff redundant. This means 200 people out of 2000,’ the company’s press officer Yana Dukhnovskaya said to an UrBC reporter. Besides, it has already been announced earlier that Pnevmostroymachina (part of Finpromco partnership) had to introduce a four-day working week, while a portion of the employees might have to leave on vacation on November 1-10, 2008. ‘It’s true that some of our workers will go on a ten-day leave next month. The workers dealing with the machines and equipment won’t be made redundant, since

Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank keeps charging the customers who want to cash their deposits before the end of the deposit period a 20% commission. This is charged in case a customer takes out more than 50,000 RUR, and the fee comes to 20% of the remainder of the sum exceeding this 50,000-ruble limit. The limitations were imposed on October 14, 2008. The spokesperson for the bank claims the main idea behind this measure was to prevent the people from taking their money back ahead of time en masse.

‘The range of flight destinations Ural Airlines is going to operate this year has been greatly expanded. We now offer our customers many more flights to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, the Czech Republic, and a number of other countries. In addition, we have recently resumed our flights to Paris and are planning on introducing a London-bound flight. In fact, over 80% of our New Year offers have already been booked and sold. We actually expect the passenger turnover to go up by 25% in the first quarter of 2009,’ Ural Airlines’ General Director Sergey Skuratov announced in the course of a

Standard & Poor’s confirmed the Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s long-term credit rating at B-. At the same time, the international agency’s long-term rating outlook was demoted from Stable to Negative. ‘We had to reconsider the bank’s rating outlook because of the problematic environment the bank has to operate in. This trying environment is affecting the liquidity level and the asset quality of all Russian banks, and the UBRD is no exception,’ says Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Viktor Nikolskiy. On the other hand, Standard & Poor’s analysts do admit that the

URSA Bank came up with a financial report for the first half of 2008; the report has been drawn up in accordance with the International Accounting Standards. The bank’s assets rose by 1.3 times over one year and reached $8.1bn in January-June 2008. The bank’s own funds increased by 1.5 times and amounted to $1.29bn on July 1, 2008. URSA Bank’s revenues came to $96.8m, which exceeds the figures for a year earlier by 1.6 times. This is actually an indicator of a 19.9% ROE and a 2.7% return on assets, which are rather good figures for the banking sector. URSA Bank’s net lending portfolio reached