Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) came up with the quality improvement plan for 2010. To make sure the enterprise’s quality management system remains functional and efficient, MMK sets a number of quality targets for the enterprise as a whole and for its departments every year. This year, MMK intends to produce at least 11.2 million tons of metal goods. The company’s production departments are expected to improve the technologies used and thus to use no more than 1,070.2 kg of metal per ton of ready rolled products. Also, the labor productivity is expected to rise to 53.7 nominal tons

Novotel, the French hotel chain, recently opened its 13th four-star hotel in Yekaterinburg. Quite a few local VIPs were invited to attend the opening ceremony, but only two actually showed up. These were Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Alexander Misharin and Sverdlovsk Region Economics Minister Mikhail Maksimov. The General Director of OOO Kesko (the project investor) Evgeniy Bidilo, Accor Group Hotel Management Director Alexis Delaroff, and CEO Novotel were the hosts of the ceremony. Over the last two years, Kesko has invested about $30m in the hotel construction. The company’s CFO Alexander

A twenty-five-year-old woman was detained by the police in Fan Fan shopping mall in Yekaterinburg on Thursday. The woman, who is a Russian subject, had fifty grams of heroin on her, says Head of Sverdlovsk Region Administration of the Federal Drug Turnover Control Service’s Information and PR Group Elena Issayeva. The detainee claimed that a thirty-year-old woman had sold the drugs to her. This person was also detained in the mall. Later on, the police officers inspected the suspected dealer’s apartment in Yasnaya St. and found and confiscated nine packages and two plastic containers full of

‘The management of Bank VTB decided to lay off about 10% of actual employees and cut down on vacancies in both the head office and the subsidiaries. The decision regarding the redundancies was made within the framework of the bank’s expense-cutting program adopted by the Board in November 2008. Under this program, a ban on taking in any more staff has already been introduced,’ the bank’s Yekaterinburg subsidiary reported. ‘The redundancies will be made in strict accordance with the Russian labor laws. The laid-off workers will receive all the legally guaranteed payments and compensations and

‘At the end of 2009, there were eighty-nine developers in Sverdlovsk Region working on 154 projects with the total area of 1.3 million sq m. About 7,140 participatory share construction agreements worth about 43 billion RUR were signed. This is a lot of money that we can be proud of. However, there also exist a lot of private participatory share investors who have been deceived by their developers,’ Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Alexander Misharin said at a meeting in Yekaterinburg. ‘Unfortunately, these people don’t always get enough attention to their problem, even though the authorities

The public activists of Nizhniy Tagil, Sverdlovsk Region, have finished collecting signatures for the petition to the Russian Federation Public Prosecutor’s Office, the President of the Russian Federation Dmitriy Medvedev’s Administration, and Rospotrebnadzor (the state consumer rights watchdog) that calls for looking into the business activity of Russian Standard Bank. The petition was designed by Nizhniy Tagil branch of Russia’s Young Lawyers, a pressure group. The branch’s head Evgeniy Ryakin says 133 signatures were collected within one week, so the petition will soon be sent to the

The top executive of MEGA Yekaterinburg Michael Nilsson has recently left office. The spokesperson for the shopping mall reports Nilsson was appointed the company’s Regional Director. Lilia Nenasheva, former Deputy CEO and Marketing Director, is going to become the new head of MEGA Yekaterinburg. MEGA opened its first store in Yekaterinburg in October 2006.