UrBC, Moscow, September 3, 2015. Russian banks issued their borrowers 338,502 mortgage loans in rubles, with the overall amount at 555.3bn RUR, between January 1 and July 31, 2015. This is 40% less than a year earlier, Banki.ru refers to the Russian Central Bank as reporting. The average weighted interest rate has gone down from 14.04% on January 1 to 13.93% on July 1. Additionally, 67 mortgage loans in foreign currency, with the overall amount at 2.15bn RUR, were also issued in the given period. The average weighted interest rate on these mortgages was 10.08%. The overall mortgage debt came

UrBC, Moscow, September 3, 2015. Private individuals' past-due loan payments amounted to 865.1bn RUR on September 1, 2015; this was the largest figure over the last seven years, Banki.ru refers to Sequoia Credit Consolidation, a collecting agency, as stating. The collectors report the scale of lending by Russian banks went down by 5.13% by September 1 compared wit the start of the year, with the overall amount at 10.74bn RUR. The amount of loans issued to private individuals kept going down by 1% to 1.3% every month throughout January to April and by no more than 0.4% in May and June,

UrBC, Moscow, September 3, 2015. Russian movie theaters' ruble revenues dropped by 35% in August, with attendance down by 32% compared with a year earlier, Kommersant reports. The revenues obtained by movie theaters in Russia and the CIS member states (excluding Ukraine) amounted to 11.7bn RUR in June-August 2015, which was 3.5% less than last summer, film distributors report. The number of movie-goers decreased by 4.8%, down to 48.7m people. The overall decrease had to do with the disastrous August sales, when both attendance and box office plummeted by 32% and 35%, respectively. The

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 3, 2015. The weakening ruble brought about a 24.5% increase in the price of air travel for passengers departing from Yekaterinburg, Tutu.ru's PR Department told UrBC. 'The average price of an international flight came to 22,689 RUR in early September, which exceeds the figures for early July by 24.5%. Prices reached a peak in August, with the average plane ticket from Yekaterinburg to a destination abroad available for over 24,000 RUR,' the department says. Traveling by air to the CIS member states was, however, cheaper in August than in

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 3, 2015. Sverdlovsk Region's debt came to 44.1bn RUR on July 1, which was 5% less than a month earlier, Finance Minister Galina Kulachenko said at a local government meeting. 'The figure has gone down by 5.6bn RUR, since the beginning of the year, so our debt burden is now 6.4% lower than on January 1. Sverdlovsk Region had the 18th largest debt burden among the Russian Federation constituencies in the first half of the year,' she said. According to the minister, the regional authorities are going to take out 2.795bn RUR from the federal budget to