President of Sverdlovsk Region Defense Industry Enterprises Union Sergey Maksin said at a recent meeting that twenty-three out of the region’s thirty-seven defense companies obtained a full set of state orders, the Governor’s PR Department reports. Most of these enterprises have already received advance payments on these orders. At the same time, Sverdlovsk Region still owes about 343 million RUR to the local defense industry. Maksin believes one effective way to get the money is to take legal action. However, he encouraged the heads of companies to try and reach an out-of-court settlement.

Evraz Group BOD Chairman Alexander Abramov is now the citizen of the Republic of Cyprus, Cyprus Mail reports. According to the newspaper, Abramov was allegedly one of the twenty-five foreign entrepreneurs who have been granted a citizenship by the Internal Affairs Minister’s special order. Alexander Abramov is the founder and owner of Evraz Group and is estimated to be worth $6.1bn, Gazeta Ru says. Evraz owns a number of enterprises located in Sverdlovsk Region, including Nizhniy Tagil Iron & Steel Works (NTMK), Vanadium ore mining and processing enterprise, and Vysokogorskiy ore mining

Mine pickers keep inspecting Fan Fan Trade & Entertainment Center in search of a bomb. Some unknown offender called the local militia station at about 10 AM on September 2, 2010 and claimed the mall had been mined. The law-enforcement officers arrived at the scene at once. All the visitors to the mall and all the employees had to leave the place; according to the latest news available, the staff are located outside and the building is being searched through.

The freight of OAO Uralasbest got stuck in the warehouses due to the lack of railway carriages. ‘We needed 10,100 carriages to transfer our cargo in June and July, so we applied for the needed amount and got everything coordinated with Sverdlovsk Region Railways. However, we were only given 4,400 carriages,’ OAO Uralasbest’s Deputy General Director Yakov Remennik said to Oblastnaya Gazeta. ‘In August, things went from bad to worse: for fifteen days, Sverdlovsk Region Railways kept delivering only 26% of the needed amount of carriages, which was why we can’t meet our contractual obligations.

Khanty-Mansiysk Customs processed 295,550 tons of cargo in January-August 2010, which fell short of the figures for January-August 2009 by 34.5%, the customs’ press officer reports. All in all, the customs points of Khanty-Mansiysk Customs processed 3,920 cargo manifests and transferred over 3.2 billion RUR to the federal budget.