OOO LeMa, a company which sells KIRBY vacuum cleaners, was fined for violating the consumer rights legislation. A Yekaterinburg resident applied to Sverdlovsk Region Hygiene and Epidemiology Center asking for legal advice regarding her clash with OOO LeMa located at 3 Bekhterev St. Off. 6. The said company prepared a demonstration of their product and signed a purchase and sale agreement for KIRBY model Sentra G10E in October 2009. The vacuum cleaner cost 115420 RUR. The presentation took place at night time and contained the information and claims which it was impossible to check or confirm:

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service declared that Coffee House chain appears to violate the existing advertising legislation, RIA Novosti reports. The coffee chain’s primary problem is that their outdoor advertising campaign, dubbed The Mojito Season; the thing is, the advertisements do not warn the potential consumers about the health hazards associated with excessive alcohol intake. This is why Coffee House will have to face an administrative lawsuit and might end up paying between 100,000 RUR and 500,000 RUR in fines. OOO Coffee House & Cappuccino Bar representatives assure reporters

The Russian Federation Federal Antimonopoly Service received Х5 Retail Group’s application; the company would like to buy OAO Kopeika Trading House and its daughter enterprises. The FAS is going to consider the petition within the legally determined time limits. Now Article 33 of the Competition Protection Act states that the Service must make the decision within thirty days. This time limit could be extended if necessary, but for no longer than two more months.

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Mikhail Yurevitch informed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin about the current situation on the region’s labor market. ‘The unemployment is not as bad now as it used to be, but things still don’t look as good as we’d like. We had 69,000 jobless at the peak of the recession; now the figure comes to 48,000. It’s an impressive drop. The economy keeps getting better, so the unemployment rate keeps going down,’ the Governor said. Mikhail Yurevitch’s only concern is the machine-building industry. ‘We do not have very impressive growth figures here, even though the

The arrears of wages at some of Chelyabinsk Region’s enterprises are only a temporary phenomenon, the region’s Governor Mikhail Yurevitch said at today’s meeting with the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Chelyabinsk. ‘We do have some arrears of wages in a few cases. The thing is, the arrears are very small and only come to about 15 million RUR; what is more, all these problem enterprises are now under my personal supervision. Our plenipotentiary representative of the Russian Federation President in Ural Federal District is also personally monitoring the situation. So we keep communicating

The number of complaints placed by the local citizens against various banks has soared over the years 2006-2009, says Sverdlovsk Region’s division of Rospotrebnadzor (the federal human wellbeing and consumer rights protection service). For one, the service received 90 written pleas in 2009 compared with only 2 three years earlier. According to Rospotrebnadzor, customers are unhappy with OOO Home Credit & Finance Bank, ZAO Bank Russian Standard, OAO Alfa-Bank, OAO AKB Rosbank, OOO Renaissance Capital Commercial Bank, OAO Bank 24.ru, OOO Rusfinance Bank, and a number of other money-lending

The share dividend determined by OAO Concern Kalina for the company’s stockholders for the first half of 2010 may actually be the same as the one paid in the second half of 2009. The company’s BOD suggested at an EGM on July 22, 2010 that the stockholders set the ordinary share dividend at 10.66 RUR. The same amount of money was paid per share in the second half of 2009. All in all, 103.55 million RUR was directed to dividend payments then.

OOO IKEA Mos, the company that runs MEGA family-style shopping and entertainment centers in Russia, came up with the annual report for the year 2009. It turns out the organization finished the year off with 2.22 billion RUR worth of losses against 3.4 billion RUR worth of losses in 2008, Interfax says. As of June 30, 2010, OOO IKEA Mos ran thirteen MEGA stores in Russia, of which three are based in Moscow and two are located in Saint Petersburg; also, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Nizhniy Novgorod, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Ufa have one store each.

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court ruled on June 30, 2010 that ZAO AMUR car factory based in Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk Region, must undergo bankruptcy proceedings for eighteen months. The ruling was made within the hearing of case А60-12994/2009-С11. Evgeniy Fedotovskikh, a member of Ural Self-Regulatory Organization of Bankruptcy Commissioners, was appointed the company’s trustee in bankruptcy.

A group of German diplomats and architects presented their design of the building which will house Germany’s Consulate-General in Yekaterinburg to the city’s Mayor Arkadiy Chernetskiy, the city council’s press service reports. ‘In the future, a whole consulate block will be put up next to our building, to host the diplomatic representations of many other foreign states. The German consulate is going to be the ‘first robin’ here, which is why we pay so much attention to the design,’ the city council reports. However, Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy found the design that was proposed

OAO Uralvagonzavod Scientific and Production Corporation offered the premises of its Yekaterinburg representation in Pushkin St. for sale. The advertising regarding the sale of 1,640 sq m worth of office space is now placed on the building itself. The enterprise first announced its plans to close down the Yekaterinburg and Lipetsk offices as early as a year ago. Uralvagonzavod then said that a research had been done on the representations’ activity, the functions they performed, and the expenses the plant incurred to keep them running. ‘It could be that, depending on the research findings,

Mobile phone users based in Yekaterinburg started receiving text messages that encourage them to use a certain United Taxi Service. One of these mobile subscribers informed UrBC he never agreed to receive any mobile advertising. Utel’s information center did admit to UrBC that the mobile phone number used for sending out these text messages was registered with their company, in Perm Territory. The taxi service refused to provide any comments. Illegal m-advertising is practiced increasingly often in Sverdlovsk Region these days. For one, Sverdlovsk Region’s division of the Federal Antimonopoly

Moody's Investors Service, the international rating agency, changed the outlook of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) Ва3 corporate rating and Аа3.ru national scale rating from Stable to Positive, the agency reports.

OAO Svyaznoy Ural has promised to compensate the damage done to the company’s customers by a dishonest employee. ‘The employees’ unlawful actions get tracked by our security service and the control departments of our partner companies. Our customers will receive their compensation,’ Svyaznoy Ural informed UrBC. Meanwhile, Yekaterinburg’s Leninskiy district court’s ruling regarding the corporate fraud within Svyaznoy came into effect. The lawsuit involved charges of fraud related to loan-giving practices of one of the mobile service chain store’s employees. The court determined that the

Yekaterinburg’s Oktyabrskiy district court made OAO Koltsovo Airport stop violating the rights of the disabled. Sverdlovsk Region’s prosecution authorities checked the airport’s compliance with the law for the protection of the disabled and detected a number of problems there. It was determined that despite the federal legislation requirements and construction norms, the staircase leading to the airport’s VIP terminal does not have any protective rails, so the motion impaired passengers cannot enter the business class terminal safely. What is more, the bathrooms of the VIP terminal and of the

The head of Ural Federal District’s division of the Federal Strong Drinks Market Regulating Service Dmitriy Lebedev declared OOO Omega Spirits Group had committed numerous offenses in the past. ‘The company now owes millions and cannot pay its creditors back. It’s easy to say that the cause of its insolvency is the ban our Service imposed on the group’s license. This ban is, in fact, quite a story. All of this company’s problems are rooted in its way of doing business,’ Lebedev announced at a press conference in Yekaterinburg. ‘OOO Omega Spirits Group turned to be a multiple offender, and now

Yekaterinburg customs drew up a performance report for the first half of 2010. 1,400 local legal entities got involved in foreign trade in January to June 2010, which was 15.6% more than in the first half of 2009. These companies filled in 26,700 cargo manifests (against 20,500 manifests a year earlier). The trade turnover amounted to $3.4bn, which was 28% more than in the first half of 2009. Ordzhonikidzevskiy district’s customs had the greatest increase in foreign trade turnover over the given period, that is, 29%. The total trade turnover within the Yekaterinburg customs area rose by 22.3%

Ural Airlines came up with a performance report for the first half of 2010. The company rendered its services to 34% more passengers and operated 35% more flights than in the first half of 2009: all in all, 753,420 people used the airline in January-June 2010 and 7,020 flights were operated, of which 3,680 flights were domestic ones, 2,050 flights were international ones, and 1,280 flights were operated within the CIS. As for the passenger turnover, 366,880 passengers used the carrier’s domestic flights in the first half of 2010, which was 36% more than a year earlier. 270,620 people took

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) came up with a production performance report for the second quarter of 2010. The company manufactured 2,985,000 tons of steel and 2,623,000 tons of goods over the given period, which was, respectively, 9% and 7% better than in the first quarter of 2010. The enterprise’s hot-rolled production dropped by 112,000 tons, or 7% in the second quarter compared with the first quarter of the year; on the other hand, the output of goods with high added value increased by 174,000 tons, of 24%, with the share of such goods in the company’s total goods output rose

OOO Renaissance Capital Commercial Bank is closing down some of its representations in the Russian regions. The decision to this extent has been made by the company’s only stockholder. The change will involve the bank’s offices in Perm, Yekaterinburg, Naberezhniye Chelny, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, and Lipetsk.