February 19, 2015. Nizhniy Tagil’s Sputnik, a hockey club sponsored by Uralvagonzavod Corporation, is now eligible to enter the Supreme Hockey League’s play off. ‘This was possible due to beating the league’s front-runner, Saryarkoy from Kazakhstan. Sputnik was 24th out of 26 teams last year, but this time its overall ranking is one of the best,’ the corporation’s press service says. Chairman of Sputnik’s board of trustees Alexei Zharich congratulated the team and their manager on the season’s victory and said he hoped they would fight hard in the play off. ‘Following the last season’s

February 19, 2015. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development added a new option to its range of e-banking services: customers can now view the schedule of interest payment or capitalization for their remotely controlled savings deposits (namely, Profitable, Advantageous, Manageable, and Paycheck), the bank’s press service reports. The schedule provides dates on which the interest is paid, the interest rate for the given deposit period, and the amount of interest paid. This new option means the bank’s customers can check how much profit they’ve made and when the next payment is due at

February 19, 2015. The turnover of goods at Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport’s customs points declined by 20% this year compared with the beginning of 2014, the Customs’ head Sergey Abrosimov announced at a press conference. He added the international passenger traffic shrank even more drastically, by as much as 35%. ‘Nevertheless, we expect the passenger traffic figures to recover by the middle of the year, primarily thanks to travelers going on their vacations, as migrant workers have remained a considerable part of the overall international passenger statistics,’ he pointed out. As for

February 19, 2015. 13% of Yekaterinburg businesses are planning to offer their employees a pay raise this year, HeadHunter’s research team states. Under 5% of companies intend to reduce their workers’ pay, and 45% expect their staff salaries to remain unchanged. However, even those employers that do plan on pay raises are only prepared for this raise to be under 10%. Quite a few companies (36%) say they haven’t made up their minds yet and will have to play it by ear. Interestingly, middle-level managers are the ones at risk as far as a pay decrease is concerned: if a business does go through

February 19, 2015. The arrears of wages went up by 22.8%, or by 457m RUR in January 2015, Rossiyskaya Gazeta refers to Rosstat as stating. As of February 1, 2015, Russian employers owed salaries and wages to 71,000 workers. For one, the arrears rose by 14 times due to the fact that money was not delivered from the government budget funds in time. The overall amount of wage arrears came to less than 1% of the consolidated one month’s pay of a working citizen. 44% of this money is owed by employers in the processing sector, 15% by those in the construction industry, 11% by those in the