Starting February 26, 2010 Ural Airlines is to increase the number of its international flights operated from Samara and to introduce a new flight from Samara to Hudzhant, Tajikistan. The flight will be operated every Friday using an A320 airplane according to the following timetable: Samara-Hudzhant flight: departure time is 1:50 AM; arrival time is 6:00 AM; Hudzhant-Samara flight: departure time is 8:00 AM; arrival time is 10:00 AM;

A number of Russian banks fail to meet the Federal Financial Market Service’s requirements aimed at counteracting laundering proceeds from criminal activity as well as terrorist financing, Vedomosti reports. So the Service’s management intends to take strict measures against the non-compliers. ‘We often refuse to approve of banks’ internal rules and policies that do not meet the legal requirements. At the moment, we just ask the banks to adjust their rules, but if we still find problems, we’ll take action and might even cancel a bank’s license,’ Vedomosti quotes Head of the Federal Financial

Sverdlovsk Region’s division of the Federal Antimonopoly Service instituted legal proceedings against OOO Autoleader-Vostok, accusing the car dealer of violating advertising laws. The division received a complaint from a private individual who claimed that the company’s website used an advertisement which violated Article 5 (part 7) of the Advertising Act, namely, the ad failed to give some essential information about the product or the terms of purchase and usage; also, the information that was present in the ad was allegedly inaccurate, and the consumers appeared to be deluded. For one, the

Standard & Poor's repots that the merger of OAO AKB Rosbank with a few Russia-based daughter enterprises of Bank Société Générale is not going to affect Rosbank’s ratings immediately. Société Générale (SocGen; A+/Stable /A-1) and Interros’s Rosbank (BB+/Negative /B; national scale rating: ruAA+) announced the news on February 18, 2010. Rosbank and Bank Société Générale Vostok (a universal bank with no rating) will merge into a single structure but will both keep their independent brands, while OOO Rusfinans Bank (a bank dealing in consumer loans with no rating) and ZAO KB DeltaCredit

The situation around Lufthansa’s Yekaterinburg-Frankfurt flight that was to have been operated on February 25, 2010 still remains unclear. The airline’s pilots went on strike and so two flights from Yekaterinburg to Frankfurt scheduled for February 23 and 25, 2010 had to be canceled. The spokesperson for Koltsovo Airport of Yekaterinburg informed UralBusinessConsulting that the airport did not know whether the flight scheduled for February 25, 2010 would actually be operated, whereas the German carrier announced the strike would be postponed by two weeks. ‘We are not the ones to make the