The analysts of the Delovoy Kvartal magazine came up with a top list of Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovsk Region-based banks that did best in terms of consumer lending volumes as of July 1, 2010. OAO SKB-Bank proved one of the first local banking organizations in terms of total lending portfolio volume and the bank with the largest volume of loans issued to private individuals. The magazine analysts report SKB-Bank offered a total of 8.227 billion RUR worth of loans to private customers by July 1, 2010. The bank’s grand lending portfolio comprises 7.5 billion RUR worth of consumer loans and about

Summertime is the traditional vacation period when all the business activity goes through a downfall of sorts. Nevertheless, these summer months have been special in that the gradual economic recovery and the increasing demand for goods and services made the business community feel more optimistic than usual. Now that borrowing money has grown cheaper it looks both possible and profitable. As a result, small and medium enterprises are taking out increasingly more bank loans. ‘We offered thrice as many loans to SMEs in August 2010 than we did at the beginning of the summer, and the demand for

Over 420,000 foreigners visited Yekaterinburg in January-September 2010, which was actually 27,000 more than in the year 2009. It has been estimated that 539,000 foreign citizens will have visited the city by the end of the year 2010, says Ilona Starodubtseva, Deputy Mayor of Yekaterinburg Viktor Konteev’s press secretary. As a matter of fact, 48% of foreigners arrive in Yekaterinburg to get hired, 31% come on private visits, 19% have business to do here, 2.6% come as tourists, and 2% intend to study here. Experts report Yekaterinburg has developed a great tourism-hosting and international

‘I’m not going to resign unless I feel positive that the new city-managing system is viable,’ Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy announced at a press conference in the town hall. Chernetskiy also said the idea of a people-elected mayor who’d also chair the municipal Duma plus a Duma-appointed head of the administration looked good to him. The mayor added that the current system had a lot of advantages; for one, it protected Yekaterinburg from incompetent people in power. He stressed that any changes in the way a city is administered had to be made extremely carefully. Arkadiy