Following the order issued by Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel, the region’s Deputy Minister for International and Foreign Economic Relations Boris Shipitsin is no longer in office, the spokesperson for the Ministry reports. Boris Shipitsin resigned of his own accord because he wished to retire. The official’s length of state service comes to thirty-eight years.

Sverdlovsk Region is an industrially developed region focused on metallurgy and machine-building, 60% of which happen to be export-oriented. Unfortunately, the demand for the region’s produce has dropped, so have the prices, all of which has resulted in trouble for this area,’ Director of the State Employment Service’s Sverdlovsk Region Department Vyacheslav Krivel admitted at a press conference. ‘I just don’t like to scare the people off by enumerating all the enterprises that have had to make their workers redundant. I do know, however, that things are hard at Uralmashzavod at the moment.

‘A customer used to receive a car they had bought within five days of the purchase, but now the dealers are beginning to take their time, sometimes making the wait period last up to a month. This is the case with Autoland, for instance,’ Europlan’s Business Development Director Alexander Mikhailov was reported as saying to Vedomosti. ‘The company has extended the official wait for the paid-for cars to thirty days,’ says Autoland-Siberia’s Konstantin Kudryavtsev. ‘This particular dealer is having some difficulty servicing its own debts, as Baltiyskiy Bank laid a claim against them in March.

URSA Bank’s shareholders gathered at the annual general meeting on May 8, 2009 to vote for the bank’s merger with MDM-Bank and MDM Banking Holding. This proposal received 99.64% of votes. In addition to taking this decision, the stockholders also approved of raising URSA Bank’s authorized capital through an issue of ordinary shares and the eighth-type preference shares that are to be converted from MDM-Bank and MDM Banking Holding’s ones. According to the bank’s press officer, the new, enlarged bank’s next challenge will be to get the company registered by the Bank of Russia. ‘The new bank is

Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel met the General Director of Uralvagonzavod (the Nizhniy Tagil-based industrial giant) Oleg Sienko. The business executive explained that the global financial crisis had hit the enterprise really hard, with the company now owing about 39 billion RUR to its creditors (including .65 billion RUR worth of unpaid heating and electricity bills). At the same time, Uralvagonzavod did manage to pay all of its taxes, Sienko proudly noted. Head of Sverdlovsk Region Government Viktor Koksharov and his first deputy and Minister for Industry and Science Anatoly