Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court held a preliminary hearing of the claim laid by Bank Severnaya Kazna’s minority shareholder Oksana Shishkina against Bank Severnaya Kazna and Alfa-Bank. The plaintiff insisted on Alfa-Bank making Bank Severnaya Kazna go through with the public buy-out offer. In the end, the court proceedings were postponed until May 14, 2009. Shishkina feels Alfa-Bank must buy her 1,276,500 shares at the highest price offered to the other stockholders. According to the plaintiff’s claim, Bank Severnaya Kazna must call a BOD meeting and make its recommendations to the

Public Services & Utilities Support Fund, the state corporation, canceled the general agreement they had with Khanty-Mansiyskiy Bank regarding the bank deposits, the spokesperson for the fund reports. The decision was taken because of Standard & Poor's demoting the bank’s credit rating down to В+ on April 21, 2009. Now this rating does not meet the criteria the Russian banks have to meet in order to be allowed to accept the fund’s reserves in the form of deposits.

SMU Uralmash’s Board of Directors decided in the course of their recent meeting that the stockholders should be advised to pass the dividend for 2008. The stockholders themselves are to gather at the annual general meeting on June 25, 2009. The other points on the agenda have to do with electing the new BOD and approving of the annual report.

The 20,000 employees of Uralvagonzavod who have been made redundant recently are to increase the number of Nizhniy Tagil’s unemployed to 30,000 people. The enterprise’s GD Oleg Sienko signed the decree making 20,000 workers temporarily redundant for the period of May 4-29, 2009. In the meantime, the local unemployment figures are still on the rise: prior to these layoffs, there were 10,479 jobless in the city, which comes to 5.1% of the working age population.

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin directed an additional 26 million RUR to compensating the expenses of public transport entities (which have offered a 50% fare discount to pensioners traveling to the countryside by bus). According to the spokesperson for the Governor, the money is to be distributed among the transport organizations of the region’s cities and towns to make sure the retirees can enjoy the discount on May 1, 2009-October 15, 2009. 4 million RUR was allotted to the city of Chelyabinsk for this purpose in May, so the compensation comes to 30 million RUR altogether, 20