‘The prices for tours offered to foreign visitors who’d like to visit Yekaterinburg in April and May 2009 haven’t been even determined yet, even though our partners abroad keep asking for the price list. No European firm would ever sell a tour without a certain price, so this leads to our losing a lot of customers from Germany,’ Sputnik Yekaterinburg International Travel Agency’s Regional Travel Director Alla Galaktionova said to an UrBC reporter. ‘As far as this year is concerned, it was Germany that the lion’s share of foreign travelers arrived from in Yekaterinburg in January-September

Sberbank of Russia’s Ural branch issued its 3,000,000th bank card recently. ‘This is a major event for our bank, since we managed to reach this record extremely rapidly: our 2,000,000th cardholder was congratulated on getting this very special card as recently as one year ago. Setting such records is a pleasure we are always eager to share with our customers,’ Sberbank of Russia’s Ural branch’s Bank Card Management Director Svetlana Skorinova said to their happy 3,000,000th cardholder. In fact, every other family living in the Urals is using Sberbank’s cards at the moment, with over 3,000

‘The share of non-core assets that our newly bought banks used to run is insignificant on our Group’s scale. So the better part of these bank’s assets is quite manageable. The thing is, a number of their management’s mistakes led to their inability to promptly react to the dramatic deposit outflow,’ Probusinessbank’s President Sergey Leontiev said in the course of his interview to Kommersant. Probusinessbank (aided by the Deposit Insurance Agency, the state-run corporation) acquired Gazenergobank and Bank24.ru that had experienced grave liquidity problems. ‘Firstly, the banks’ management did

Standard & Poor’s, the international rating agency, demoted Alfa Bank’s contractor’s long-term credit rating from BB to BB-, while Alfa Bank’s national scale rating was decreased from ruAA to ruAA-. The bank’s long-term rating was affirmed at B, with Stable rating outlook. ‘This drop has to do with the Russian economy and the banking sector’s systemic risks that have affected Alfa Bank’s business and prospects somewhat badly. For one, the bank’s asset quality, resource base, and capitalization got worse, causing the business’s profitability to decrease,’ says Standard & Poor’s analyst