Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin demanded in the course of the recent meeting with heads of the region’s municipalities that all the wage arrears should be eliminated within a week. All in all, the regional enterprises’ debt to their own workers had reached 102.8 million RUR by June 1, 2009, with thirty-four companies owing money to 7,800 employees. The Governor feels this isn’t an overwhelming sum on the regional level, so each and every of the debtor enterprises must be handled individually. ‘You’re actually protecting your pockets and not the people. If we don’t protect them, no

‘Our tenth Airbus 320 airplane (acquired from a British company) has recently arrived in Yekaterinburg, with another one on the way and two more expected at the end of June. In fact, we’ll be running twelve Airbus aircraft in mid-June, two of which are going to be Airbus 321 ones and ten will belong to the A 320 family. These are the planes we are planning to hit the winter season with,’ Ural Airlines Commercial Director Kirill Skuratov announced at a press conference in Yekaterinburg. ‘We are launching the new non-stop Yekaterinburg-Beijing flight on July 1, 2009, since the airplanes with

Ural Federal District’s division of Rostechnadzor (the industrial safety watchdog) and the regional labor inspection completed the investigation of an accident that took place at Uralkhimplast on April 15, 2009. It was detected that an explosion occurred at the ion exchanger unit because of neglected technological regulation. As a result, the reactor was over-filled with excess amount of ammonia solution over a very short period of time, causing an uncontrollable exothermal reaction. The lack of accident-preventing automatic protection and violation of the industrial safety rules at the

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court keeps looking into the claim laid by Microsoft Corporation against Gorizont Ltd regarding the 384,188-ruble compensation. The case has been united with the claim laid by Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. against Gorizont regarding the 1,222,817.96 –ruble compensation for copyright abuse. The defendant has recently provided some documents indicating that the computers related to the alleged offense belong to N.A. Semikhatov Scientific Production Association (NPO Avtomatika), which is why the plaintiff asked for making the enterprise an intervener with one

URSA Bank and MDM-Bank’s ATM networks are now operating under the same range of tariff schemes and offers. The holders of Visas and MasterCards issued by either of the banks can now get some cash in all of their ATMs without any commission. The new offer was launched in June, with both banks’ processing centers united into a single technological system, URSA Bank’s press officer reports. URSA Bank’s ATM network comes to 785 machines in the Urals and Siberia. The addition of MDM-Bank’s machines will expand the network to 2,000 units throughout the country, thus making the united network

Serov investigative authorities (operating within the local division of the Russian Federation public prosecution authorities) have recently completed their inquiry into the accident that led to contamination of the River Turya, the spokesperson for the authorities reports. The authorities carried out a detailed investigation of why the River Turiya, Sverdlovsk Region, had turned red. It was detected that the area around UC RUSAL Bogoslovskiy smelter’s slurry pipeline got contaminated because the pipeline had leaked. So, some of the slurry was washed down into the river with melt-water,