‘The current tourist demand is extremely low. The dramatic market downfall is obvious, both Moscow and Yekaterinburg keep canceling more and more flights. The majority of cancelled flights were those bound for some warm, beach destinations. What is more, people simply stopped booking in advance; most agents haven’t even sold the tours offered for the end of February. Even special ‘hot’ offers are not selling very well. The reason for this is both the growing euro and dollar exchange rates and the financial crisis,’ Inna Tour Travel Agency’s Director Inna Averyanova said to an UrBC reporter.

400 billion RUR entered the Russian banking system in the form of deposits in December 2008, Chairman of the Central Bank of Russia Sergey Ignatiev reported at a special meeting on economic issues chaired by the President. Ignatiev feels things got back to normal in December. ‘The private customers’ deposits dropped by about 360 billion RUR in October; then, the amount remained practically the same in November and rose by 400 billion RUR in December. Given the troubles in the fall, we got a very positive result at the beginning of winter,’ he said. Andrei Melnikov, the Deposit Insurance

Sverdlovsk Region Court of Arbitration started hearing case А60-40279/08 regarding Alfa Ural Trading House’s possible insolvency on January 16, 2009. According to the court files, the company placed its application with the court on December 19, 2008, asking to declare their bankruptcy. Alfa Ural claimed they were unable to meet their liabilities in full since the amount of debt exceeded the cost of the company’s property and assets. The accounts payable indicated in the application came to over 81.957 million RUR. The company is undergoing bankruptcy proceedings at the moment, with the

Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy met with the committee responsible for the organization of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit this June to discuss the preparation process, the spokesperson for the city council reports. It was explained in the course of the meeting that global economic and financial problems made the summit coordinators reduce the number of construction projects meant for the event. These were Demidovskiy Business Center, Central Stadium, Antey Business Center’s third section, Europe Trade & Business Center, Greenwich Trade Center’s third section,

Ural Airlines came up with a performance report for 2008. In December 2008, the carrier serviced 77,834 passengers, which was 5% better than a year earlier. 18,338 people used the airline’s international flights (10% more than in December 2007), 45,437 people used domestic flights (9% less than a year earlier), and 14,059 people used the flights within the CIS (84% more than in December 2007). The airline operated 798 flights in December 2008 altogether, which exceeded the figures for a year earlier by 2%. The figures include 170 international flights (11% more than in December 2007), 480