Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin met the heads of the region’s sports federations: Deputy Governor and President of Chelyabinsk Region Olympic Boxing Federation Evgeniy Redin, Minister for Physical Education, Sports, and Tourism Yuri Stepkin, Vice President of the All-Russian Athletics Association Georgiy Necheukhin, and Vice President of the regional judo association Dmitriy Khudyakov. The spokesperson for the Governor reports the meeting was dedicated to issues related to amateur and professional sports development in the region. The Governor said Yuri Stepkin and the other

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) won in the Best Exporter of 2008 contest organized by the Russian Federation Ministry for Industry and Trade in order to support the local exporters. In the course of the contest, the country’s best industrial exporters were chosen in seventeen categories such as the Best Exporter to the CIS, the Most Dynamically Developing Exporter, and so on. The applications and the supporting documents were considered by the Ministry’s Foreign Economic Relations Department. MMK won the contest as Russia’s Best Exporter to the CIS among the metallurgical

‘I feel focusing on hotel construction is more reasonable just now than concentrating on housing. The thing is, the hotel estate market is doing better at the moment than the housing one, even though things are not at all splendid there,’ Accord Invest’s Ural branch’s Director Konstantin Selyanin said to an UrBC reporter. Meanwhile, Mayak Corporation has recently announced that they were leaving the housing market for the hotel one. ‘Housing estate that used to be Mayak and many other builders’ main source of income is now in grave trouble, largely because the supply does not correspond with

Starting July 1, 2009, Bank Severnaya Kazna (the asset of Alfa-Bank) is going to use some special protective commissions. For instance, they will take a monthly commission of 100 RUR/?3/$3 for managing their ACCORD accounts; the commission will be taken out on the last day of each month, in the currency identical to that of the account (provided there is some money in it). Then, there will be a commission for topping up one’s account at the bank’s cash desks, if this is the VISA Electron Instant Issue card account created to pay off the bank’s ruble loans. The only exception to this rule is

Bank Severnaya Kazna (Alfa-Bank’s asset) is going to introduce a new policy on private customers on July 1, 2009. For one, the bank will no longer render any services related to opening fixed term or demand deposits, creating a customer’s electronic signature, and issuing additional MasterCard or Visa cards for existing customers (except for Visa Instant Issue, however).

Customers might find themselves unable to use some of Alfa-Bank’s Yekaterinburg-based offices on June 11-18, 2009. According to the bank’s official website, this has to do with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the city that week, with limitations also imposed on automobile and pedestrian travel. This is why Alfa-Bank suggests that their customers have all the transactions done at their outlets at 42 Malyshev St., 17 Gorki St., and 3 Khimikov Lane carried out in advance.

Sky Express, a low-cost airline, flew 217,661 passengers in the four months of 2009, which is 16% less than in the first four months of 2008, the carrier’s press officer reports. ‘Now that the whole Russian air industry is going trough some trouble, Sky Express’s main challenge is to keep up with last year’s passenger turnover figures and the number of operated flights,’ says the company’s General Director Marina Bukalova. In fact, the airline’s passenger turnover amounted to 305,457,726 passenger-kilometers in January-April 2009, which falls short of last year’s figures by 17.5%. In the