‘It took me a long time to understand why Enel OGK-5 has organized public hearings that do not comply with the existing legislation. Having read the comments you gave to the media, I can now see that you actually admit you don’t know the Russian laws and that you never presented any environmental estimates of the plant’s activity at these hearings,’ Chairman of the International Socio-Environmental Union Vladimir Terekhov says in his letter to Enel OGK-5 PR Director Vasiliy Zakharov. What Zakharov actually said was that the multi-faceted evaluation of their company’s environmental impact was

The volume of loans offered by Uraltransbank to private for-profit organizations despite overdraft went down by 24.28% (from 104.396 million RUR to 79.041 million RUR) in August 2009.

On October 7, 2009, the Supreme Court of Italy is to consider the Russian authorities’ appeal against the Italian court’s refusal to extradite Bank24.ru’s former BOD member Alexei Kalinichenko. The former executive is suspected of large-scale fraud, says the spokesperson for Ural Federal District’s division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The extradition request was placed with the Italian authorities by the Russian Federation General Prosecutor’s Office international legal cooperation department on July 3, 2008. By then, Kalinichenko had already been detained by the Italian Interpol

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court keeps looking into the claim laid by the Federal Tax Service against Aston Construction Company. The Service’s local division (based in Yekaterinburg’s Verkh-Isetskiy district) asked the court to declare the builder insolvent, as the company’s tax debts had run up to 953,880 RUR over the last thee months. The defendant has not provided the court with any comments or data so far.

Trade union activists are going to picket Yekaterinburg-based office buildings of Concern Kalina and Uralplastik on World Action Day, the spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Region Trade Unions Federation reports. ‘In both companies, the workers are trying to set up trade unions despite the management’s disapproval. Kalina’s top executives have always been against employee self-organization, even though the right to join a trade union is guaranteed to every Russian citizen by the federal legislation. The management must remember, however, that it’s a free country that has no slaves doing only what