‘The bad debt problem is the most common one for a bank during an economic meltdown. It’s true that the amount of overdue debt on loan payments only tends to increase lately, and I think this is only the beginning,’ Home Credit & Finance Bank CEO Ivan Svitek announced at the press conference on the introduction of the bank’s Yekaterinburg branch. ‘We keep working on the cushion mechanics, so to say; for one, we’ve grown pickier in terms of whom to give money to. The borrowers who find themselves unable to pay the loan off are offered debt restructuring (if we can be positive that they

‘The international hauls are not very popular at the moment. The number of flights operated to the hot countries like Egypt and Thailand and to Europe kept going down in January and February 2009. Thus, the number of flights bound for Hurghada, Sharm El Sheikh, Bangkok, Dubai, Prague, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Budapest dropped by 7.6%, 19.3%, 30.1%, 33.8%, 17%, 19.4%, 32.1%, and 7.1%, respectively,’ Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport’s press officer said to an UrBC reporter. The only exception to this rule is destinations to Tianjin, China and Goa, India: the number of flights operated to

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court keeps looking into the claim laid by A.K. Serov Metallurgical Plant against Severskiy Pipe Works regarding the recovery of 266,871,317.54 RUR. The preliminary court session took place on December 26, 2008. The plaintiff placed the claim with the regional Arbitration Court in order to make the defendant pay the above-mentioned sum. The figures are made up of 263,785,358.48 RUR worth of the price the defendant allegedly failed to pay for the goods delivered in accordance with the agreement 734/2331 as of November 19, 2007 and 3,085,959.06 RUR worth of

‘A number of luxury brands are expected to leave the local market in the near future. In most cases, this has to do with the companies failing to invest cleverly or to assess the brand’s potential adequately prior to the market launch. Besides, there’s the problem of receivables and the loan pressure. To make matters worse, not a single Russian group is interested in buying a luxury project and developing it at the moment, since the local luxury market cannot appeal to the major players right now,’ says Anna Kochneva of Vindex Group (the representative of Givenchy, Gianfranco Ferre,

‘The article called AVS Group Builds on Wings that one of the newspapers carried recently is not quite accurate. It’s not true that AVS Group now owns a 53% shareholding in Ural Civil Aviation Plant, in spite of what the Group’s press officer was reported as saying. We have no idea of how the Group could possibly acquire the shareholding. The plant’s management was shown some papers which absolutely do not prove that the Group has any property rights over the shareholding whatsoever,’ says the plant’s Commercial Director’s Assistant Alexander Plotnikov. In the meantime, AVS Group’s PR