Mechel Trading Company is about to close down a number of subsidiaries it runs in Ural Federal District. This covers the company’s Chelyabinsk subsidiary at 32 Paveletskaya St. in Chelyabinsk and Ural subsidiary located at 7 Dzerzhinskiy St. in Chebarkul.

Bank Severnaya Kazna decreased the amount of money directed to stock and securities investment by over 668 million RUR in September 2008. According to Bank24.ru’s official website, the bank had 4.04 billion RUR worth of securities investments on September 1, 2008, whereas a month later, the figure only came to 3.37 billion RUR, which indicates a 16% drop in the amount of investments.

Novolipetsk Iron & Steel Works (NLMK) declared recently that the enterprise’s net profit had gone down by 6.21 billion RUR, or 16.8%, in the third quarter of 2008 compared with the figures for the second quarter of the year. The company believes this drop has to do with the 13.6-billion-ruble decrease in the dividends obtained from NLMK’s daughter enterprises.

The Italian court agreed to prolong the detention term of Alexei Kalinichenko until February 2009. The accused is suspected of masterminding a pyramid scheme and embezzling more than 1 billion RUR and is now under the criminal extradition proceedings. The Russian authorities revealed that for a number of years, Kalinichenko had been advertising his company and promising people a lot of income from the interbank foreign currency exchange speculation his firms would deal in using the investors’ money. The accused even went so far as to upload fake financial reports about his companies’

Starting November 1, 2008, one of the stores run by Sela, the clothes manufacturer, and located at 62/2 Lenin Ave. will no longer be operating. Five Yekaterinburg-based stores and a shop in Berezovskiy used to be owned by the proprietors of Boston 2000 Valeriy Balyabin and Vladimir Pashkin. The two men decided at the end of August 2008 that they would give up on the franchise and give the shops back to Saint Petersburg-based Skala Asia, Sela’s daughter enterprise. Valeriy Balyabin explained the decision had been taken because of the decreased profitability of the local clothes market.