I don’t think any financial guarantees can save a tour operator on the brink of bankruptcy. For one, these guarantees did not help much in the case of Capital Tour and its customers. As a result, people were forced to pay for the hotel rooms themselves, they found themselves hostages of the problem. The thing is, Capital Tour still owes money to hotels and airlines. This is why I really do not see how a financial guarantee can save either the tour operator or the client,’ Director of OOO Inna Tour Inna Averyanova told UrBC. Meanwhile, the prospective changes in the tourist legislation will

The Swedish furniture maker IKEA is calling off 6,000 children’s beds due to a production fault. According to the company’s press service, the beds in question, Sniglar, made at IKEA’s Rumania-based factories, are now being called off in Canada. The problem is that the fastening bolts for the beds turned out to be too short; as a result, the beds can collapse and therefore hurt the children. The beds were sold between October 2005 and June 2010, RBC reports. IKEA pointed out that no problems have been recorded up to now. However, the company strongly recommends that all Sniglar beds should be

Raiffeisenbank and RENOVA StroyGroup launched a new mortgage scheme recently that allows one to buy an apartment in Yekaterinburg’s newest Academic district. Customer willing to buy a place there can choose among three mortgage programs, all of which offer such advantageous terms as a 15% down payment, twenty-five years to pay the rest off, no moratorium on or commissions for the early repayment, no need to look for any guarantors or collateral. The bank promises to process the applications within three to five working days. What is more, through a special offer run by Raiffeisenbank between

Flight 947 from Hudzhand by Tajik Air was canceled by the airline and did not arrive at Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport recently. The flight was to have arrived at Koltsovo at 2:30 PM but was called off. No reason is stated on the airport’s interactive announcement board. This means a return flight 4918 from Yekaterinburg to Hudzhand (departure time 4:30 PM) was called off as well.

OAO Acron appealed to Head of Russian Federation Government Vladimir Putin, asking him to forbid the merger of OAO Uralkaliy and OAO Sylvinite, Vedomosti reports. Acron President Ivan Antonov has sent two letters to Putin so far. The first one is a request to forbid the merger of two companies of any kind; the second one is a proposal that Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service should refuse Uralkaliy’s request to allow the merger with Sylvinite and that Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service should look into the two companies’ compliance with the joint stock companies, securities, and

The Egyptian authorities placed an official request with Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking to reconsider their recommendation that Russian tourists shouldn’t be traveling to Egypt for the time being. The news was reported by the Egyptian Ambassador to Russia Alaa El-Hadidi in the course of a conference with the Russian tour operators. The Ministry, however, is reluctant to let Russians go to Egypt. Rostourism head Alexander Radkov says Egypt might become a welcome country very soon, but flights to Egypt are highly unlikely to be resumed in the next couple of days.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 17, 2011. ‘The creation of Titanium Valley, a special economic zone, is a new development direction for Sverdlovsk Region. In fact, with a clever approach the Valley can serve as a great starting point for the development of the hosting area,’ President of Sverdlovsk Region Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Dmitri Pumpyansky observed in the course of the union meeting. ‘It is however obvious that Titanium Valley gets no actual residents just yet: the conditions aren’t ripe enough, the infrastructure isn’t ready, the financing is still a dubious matter.

ZAO Russian Copper Company was notified by its shareholder Russian Copper Company Ltd. (RCC), that the latter had sold a 20% shareholding in Russian Copper Company Ltd to a Russian businessman Ruslan Baisarov. Baisarov will now become a member of the company’s BOD. ZAO Russian Copper Company was set up by Igor Altushkin in 2004. The group’s trading house manages the RCC Holding’s assets; it is now Russia’s third largest manufacturer of pure copper. Its production capacity comes to 200,000 tons of copper cathodes and 190,000 tons of copper wire rods a year. The company relies on its own raw

The daughter enterprise of TNK-BP TNK-Nyagan was made by the court to pay a fine of 3.3m RUR for damage to and extermination of soil on the area of 1 hectare. Rosprirodnadzor (the state environmental watchdog) carried an inspection of the company in 2009 and detected that in 2004 a strip of forest on the licensed land allotment that TNK-Nyagan had been using was contaminated with mineral oil. The agency estimated that, under the existing Forestry Code, the company was to have provided for the technological and biological reclamation of soil, but none of this ever happened. This is why

he travel agents based in the Urals keep waiting for the compensation payments from Capital Tours; the payments are to be made for the tourists whose travel expenses were covered by the agents themselves. According to the insurer Innogarant, the payments were supposed to have started in February 2011, but for the time being the company is just busy returning the applicants’ papers back for improvement. ‘Our application package was placed with Capital Tours as early as December 2010. Some of the papers have been given back to us because of some filling-in slips. What’s more, we still cannot

Starting February 15, 2011, Hungarian Consulate General in Yekaterinburg will be offering travelers Schengen Visas on behalf of the Kingdom of Denmark. ‘The terms of getting a Danish visa are no different from the general Schengen visa requirements. The visas are issued in accordance with the rules of the Schengen agreement given that all the documents required by the signers are provided. Hungarian Consulate General is allowed to issue short-term visas to Denmark if the visitors intend to stay for no longer than ninety days there,’ the consulate reports. Hungarian Consulate General in

Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service decided that the issue of Mid-Urals Development Corporation’s ordinary registered paperless shares should be resumed and the report on the additional share issue results should be registered with the Service. The shares were available via a private offering. The issue amounts to two million shares, with face value of 1,000 RUR apiece. This means the issue is worth 2bn RUR altogether.

Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service annulled the license of Tyumen-based OOO Forum Holding Plus allowing it to deal in brokerage operations and the license of Tyumen-based OAO Zapsibcombank allowing it to deal in securities management. The decisions were made on the basis of the two companies’ applications as well as proofs of the organizations having no unmet liabilities as regards their professional activity, the Service reports.

Eight new business centers, totaling 285,600 sq m in area, will be introduced in Yekaterinburg this year. Four of them are going to be Class A centers with the total area of 221,600 sq m and two Class B centers with the total area of 64,000 sq m, the city council’s press service reports. In the meantime, only one business center, Voznesensky, was launched in Yekaterinburg last year, despite much more optimistic expectations. . The centers that will probably get commissioned in the second and third quarters of 2011 are Vysotsky at 8 Krasnoarmeyskaya St, AVS at 99 Mamin-Sibiryak St, Carneol at

A delegation of officials from Sverdlovsk Region headed by Governor Alexander Misharin visited a number of Zurich-based enterprises in the course of its official stay in Switzerland. For one, the Governor met the management of Schindler, one of the leading manufacturers of economy class elevators. Alexander Misharin suggested that the company should consider setting up a joint venture in Sverdlovsk Region with RENOVA StroyGroup as a potential partner. The latter is now implementing Russia’s largest developing project Academic. The elevators will enjoy great demand within the Mid-Urals’ public

MWC2011, the international mobile communication congress in Barcelona, saw the agreement-signing process between the Russian telecommunications provider MegaFon and the international telecommunications alliance FreeMove. The alliance comprises Europe’s four major operators: Deutsche Telekom Group, Orange, TeliaSonera, and TIM (Telecom Italia Group). Joining the alliance means MegaFon turns into a more appealing partner for international companies that operate on the Russian market. First of all, the operator’s customers will be able to enjoy the special payment rates on the calls made within

Novolipetsk Iron & Steel Works (NLMK) placed an application with International Commercial Arbitrations Court under Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, asking to halt the claim laid by NLMK against founder of Maxi Group Nikolai Maksimov. The plaintiff initially wanted the defendant to pay off 5.9bn RUR worth of debt. The plaintiff reports the decision was taken because new hearings were scheduled at Moscow Arbitration Court for February 19, 2011: NLMK now insists that Maxi Group be declared bankrupt. Now the sticking point of the whole case was Maxi Group’s share price. NLMK bough

Moscow Arbitration Court did not find any evidence of bankruptcy in the documents provided by Capital Tour and therefore made the company provide some more convincing proof. The hearing has been put off until March 9, 2011, Russian Agency for Legal & Court Information reports. Now the debtor claims its debts run up to 1.59bn RUR, including 552.1m RUR worth of the bulk sum and 1.5bn RUR worth of accounts receivable. A Capital Tour representative announced the company’s assets were insufficient to pay all the creditors back, which was why they applied for bankruptcy.

Kempinski hotel chain signed an agreement with the investment & construction holding Ruzog-Invest for the management of three five-star hotels in Yekaterinburg, Yerevan, and Marienbad, frontdesk.ru reports. Although the construction of the building has not started yet, it has been reported that the Yekaterinburg hotel, complete with 200 rooms, will be opened in 2013. This is expected to be a four-storey building occupying 1,468 sq m in Gogol St. The hotel will offer its guests four restaurants and bars. According to the online portal, the hotel will also host Russia’s first 1,000 sq m big

Yet another court hearing on the case involving copyright infringement on the Net will start in Perm on February 16, 2011. The defendant is the Yekaterinburg-based web portal Weburg that specializes in offering culture and entertainment content. OOO Eurasia Cinema Production filed a claim of over a million roubles against OOO Weburg for using six poster shots on their webpage that were designed exclusively as DVD skins. The posters promote the following films: The Grifters, True Crime, The Colt, The Governor's Wife / Deadly suspicion, Nightmare at the End of the Hall, and Der