According to the findings of a research carried out by Rospotrebnadzor, the federal consumer rights watchdog, forty-two people developed chronic work-related illnesses in Yekaterinburg last year, which means every 0.7 people in 10,000 became ill. This number was 1.4 times greater than that for the year 2008, the spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Region’s division of Rospotrebnadzor reports. As far as Yekaterinburg goes, these are the machine-building and the construction industries that pose the greatest health hazards to the workers. The number of employees with work-related illnesses was the

OAO The Industrial Urals-The Polar Urals Corporation called off the opening of its Yekaterinburg office that had been announced earlier. The corporation has recently relocated its HQ from Moscow to Yekaterinburg’s Atrium Palace Hotel. Apart from this, the company also cancelled the press conference for Chairman of the corporation’s Supervisory Board Alexander Beletskiy. The press conference was supposed to have taken place on April 26, 2010.

Yekaterinburg Customs instituted legal proceedings against a local trading company that deals in the import of toys. The administrative lawsuit’s charges are based on Article 14.10 of the Russian Federation (copyright infringement). The customs officers from the intellectual property rights protection department inspected the goods and declared that 2,160 children’s mobile phones bearing Disney Princess trademark (the trademark owner being the U.S.-based Disney) were actually counterfeits. Upon this finding, the customs officials contacted the trademark owner’s official representative in

Yekaterinburg radio equipment plant’s Board of Directors suggested that the shareholders do not declare any dividends for 2009, the company reports. The annual general meeting is to take place in Yekaterinburg on June 26, 2010.

Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK) came up with a performance report for 2009. The state of the company’s financial affairs looks a bit bleak: despite EBITDA growing by 84% in the second half of 2009 against the first half, this performance indicator was still below expected and below the market consensus, Bank of Moscow’s Analytical Department reports. ‘The main reason why TMK’s actual results are so different from our forecasts is that the company’s North American division finished the year off with $5m worth of EBITDA losses (in fact, at the end of the first half of 2009 the loss figures