‘We do not expect the automobile supplies to drop because of General Motors’ recent bankruptcy. Quite on the contrary, the supply will probably go up because Sberbank intends to offer its customers the special preferential terms loans to buy Opels. This is why we presume the demand for the cars will increase in the summer,’ says Avtoban’s Sales Manager Alexei Khorkov. ‘Our show room gets the automobiles from Moscow, where there are still a lot of last year’s cars in store. This will be enough to cover our needs for a year,’ he added. Meanwhile, General Motors is going through bankruptcy

‘Nearly all of large enterprises are cooperating with the banks in terms of salary-through-a-bank-card schemes at the moment, but the market is still far from being saturated. There is still some development potential, but this involves small and medium enterprises rather than business giants (which might only be enticed into a new bank, at best),’ URSA Bank’s Vice President Alexei Sannikov said to an UrBC reporter. ‘Speaking of SMEs, these are companies with not too many employees, such as sole traders, little limited liability companies, and public sector establishments. A lot of them are

Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant and Pervouralsk New Pipe Plant (members of ChTPZ Group) as well as Uraltrubostal Trading Firm and Rimera (ChTPZ Group’s O&G maintenance division) are going to take part in the 16th international Caspian Oil & Gas 2009 exhibition in Baku, Azerbaijan on June 2-5, 2009. ChTPZ Group’s experts will be presenting their new technical solutions for the energy sector as well as displaying the potential of Pervouralsk New Pipe Plant’s finishing center for oil and gas pipelines. Once the finishing center has been launched this May, the company started manufacturing

The machine-building giant now owes 39 billion RUR to its creditors and is currently negotiating for having its debts restructured for several years, the plant’s General Director Oleg Sienko said to RBC daily. Meanwhile, Uralvagonzavod’s former GD Nikolai Malykh said at a meeting with Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel and Plenipotentiary Representative of Russian Federation President in Ural Federal District Nikolai Vinnichenko in March 2009 that the plant needed about 10 billion RUR worth of loans to pay off its debts and keep up with the existing outputs. ‘Our debts are not too

Bank Severnaya Kazna’s annual general meeting in Yekaterinburg resulted in the decision to pass the dividend for 2008. Last year’s 1,573,449,450.3 RUR worth of losses will be offset with the help of undistributed profits and share premium. In the course of the AGM, the stockholders also elected the five BOD members, rejecting, however, the bank’s former Chairman of the Supervisory Board Sergey Kuroptev (who did not get a single vote). Sergey Kuroptev happens to be one Bank Severnaya Kazna’s former top managers who placed a claim against the bank with Yekaterinburg’s Kirovskiy District court,

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) bought a 99.99% shareholding in ZAO Profit, Russia’s largest scrape metal recycler. The transaction has already been approved by MMK Board of Directors. The acquired assets comprise Profit proper and a number of its daughter enterprises dealing in scrap metal recycling as well. Historically, Profit had always fully met MMK’s scrap metal needs. For one, three-quarters of 5 million tons of scrap metal used by MMK in 2008 were actually supplied by Profit. Profit’s financial performance is now to be presented in MMK Group’s consolidated reports drawn up