Sverdlovsk Region’s public prosecution authorities for the environment detected an instance of polluting the River Chusovaya with toxic substances; the culprit is Russian Chrome 1915. ‘The company has been using obsolete filtering equipment that cannot cope with the amount of waste discharge, which means it’s doing harm to the environment,’ the prosecution authorities say. The investigation revealed that the company, which happens to be a water consumer, has been dumping inadequately filtered waste water from its neutralization station into the River Pakhotka. The waste water’s chrome content

The piracy rate has gone down by 10% in the Urals-based computer stores, even though the Urals used to be some of Russia’s top piracy areas, with the rate of up to 25% as recently as two years ago. Almost no pirated software is offered for sale. The thing is, we keep on instructing people and giving seminars for the retail outlets. Besides, we can see that the customers are no longer asking for pirated software as well,’ Microsoft Business Development Director in Ural Federal District Andrei Kinash announced at a press meeting in Yekaterinburg. ‘At the same time, we hardly pay attention to

Microsoft Corporation is going to switch to Russian rubles for settling arrangements with its Russia-based partners, Microsoft Business Development Director in Ural Federal District Andrei Kinash announced at a press meeting in Yekaterinburg. ‘The prices used to be in dollars, which in effect involved a bit of pain for our partners. This was mainly true of the educational establishments and state-run enterprises. Switching to rubles solves the problem,’ he explained. ‘We decided to bear the risks related to the rate of exchange fluctuations and accounted for them by a 10% price variation. The

Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service’s division in Ural Federal District completed its field check of West-Siberian Commercial Bank/Zapsibcombank. Following the check, the bank was ordered to remove the detected violations of securities legislations and to take steps to ensure prevention of similar offenses in future.

The public prosecution authorities of Yekaterinburg Verkh Isetsky District asked the experts from Sverdlovsk Region State Construction Surveillance Administration and Ural Federal District division of Rostechnadzor (the state technological safety watchdog) to investigate the incident of a ceiling drop at NewYorker outlet in MEGA Mall in Yekaterinburg. The ceiling collapsed in the outlet at daytime on February 3, 2011. About 90 sq m worth of light-weight ceiling structures fell down, leaving three people with bruises and scratches. Once the experts detect the cause of the incident and identify