‘Russian Minister for Agriculture Alexei Gordeev included Chelyabinsk Region in the country’s agricultural areas register, so the South Urals can now take pride in being both an agrarian and an industrial node of this part of Russia,’ Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin said in the course of a ceremony dedicated to honoring the local farmers and processing industry workers. The spokesperson for the Governor reports the region’s agricultural industry has made a real breakthrough over the last decade. Chelyabinsk Region was nearly on the bottom of the country’s Top 30 regions in the 1990s

Dmitriy Loevskiy, who has a deposit at Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank, placed his claims against the bank with the court and the public prosecution authorities on October 23, 2008. He has already sent official letters of complaint regarding the bank’s policy to the Bank of Russia and Rospotrebnadzor (the state consumer rights watchdog) earlier this week. The customer is thus trying to protect his legally supported right to using his own money he keeps in the deposit. Loevskiy placed 3,000,000 RUR onto the bank’s deposit and was planning to use the money to buy an apartment. On October 13, 2008,

Bank24.ru’s introduced the online payments limits of 3,000 RUR on October 22, 2008. In the meantime, the bank’s call center claims the limit comes to 10,000 RUR a day and to 50,000 RUR a month. They couldn’t explain why the official figures differ so much from the system’s actual performance.

Uralfinprombank’s cardholders can now only get 5,000 RUR a day through the bank’s ATMs, the organization’s call center reports. The call center’s employee said to an UrBC reporter that Uralfinprombank’s ATMs only handle the bank’s own cards for the time being. ‘We don’t accept other bank’s cards, only ours,’ he said.

URSA Bank made 150.33 million RUR worth of coupon payments on its fifth bond issue on October 22, 2008, the bank’s press officer reports. The coupon interest rate came to 10.05% a year, so each bond yielded 50.11 RUR in terms of profit. The bank went through with the three-billion-ruble bond issue on October 24, 2006 (file number 40500323 В). The issue was coordinated by Gazprombank and Citibank. The bonds are to be in circulation for five years.

METCOMBANK’s second additional share issue has been registered by the Licensing Department. The spokesperson for the bank reports 1 million shares with the face value of 1,000 RUR each were bought by the bank’s majority shareholder, which means the bank’s authorized capital has doubled and now comes to 2 billion RUR. METCOMBANK last raised its authorized capital on April 24, 2007. ‘The increase in the authorized capital was a pre-planned decision and part of our development strategy that the bank’s stockholders adopted at the end of 2007,’ the spokesperson explains. ‘The doubling of the