Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court is going to look into the claim laid by Bank Severnaya Kazna minority shareholder Oksana Shishkina against Bank Severnaya Kazna and Alfa-Bank regarding Alfa-Bank’s obligation to launch a public buy-out offer on Bank Severnaya Kazna shares. Shishkina believes Alfa-Bank must buy her shareholding (1,276,500 shares) at the highest price offered to the other stockholders. She insists on Bank Severnaya Kazna calling up a BOD meeting to make sure the BOD recommends this to the shareholders. The plaintiff also insists on having 85.021% of the bank’s registered

Yekaterinburg’s Kirovskiy district’s investigative authorities instituted criminal proceedings (with charges based on Article 146 (part 2) of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, that is, violation of author’s rights) against a local dweller. The case has been placed with the court, the spokesperson for the authorities report. The inquiry team believes the thirty-seven-year-old owner of an apartment in Mamin-Sibiryak St. was using the pirated Russian versions of Microsoft Windows Professional SP3, Microsoft Office 2007, and other software programs copyrighted by Microsoft. The total damage

Following the order issued by the head of Rostourism Anatoly Yarochkin, over 655 tour operators have been excluded from the federal register after they failed to provide any data on their financial guarantees for the new term, the spokesperson for Roustourism (the federal tourist agency) reports. There is a number of Yekaterinburg-based companies on this list: Inturline-99, TBK Inturline, Ural Tourist Company, Mega Tour, Orange Tour, Orange Tour Region, Finnex-tour, Mir-Voyage, Cleo Tur, Alexandria, Piligrim, Reise, Inform-Tour, Southern Cross-Yekaterinburg, Soglasiye-Ek, Kurortniy Mir,

The revenues of VIZ-Stal dropped by 73.42% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the last one of 2008; at the same time, the company’s gross profit went down by 71.86%, its sales revenues by 75.77%, and its net profit by 74.56%. Such are the results of Novolipetsk Iron & Steel Works (NLMK) daughter enterprise’s performance in January-March 2009. NLMK’s press officer reports the problems have to do with the plummeting demand for VIZ-Stal’s products. ‘The global demand for transformer steel decreased at the beginning of the year because of the economic crisis and the customers’