According to the Central Bank of Russia, volume of for-profit self-regulatory organizations’ deposits in UralFinPromBank valid for 181 days to 1 year went down by 38.46% (from 19.5 million RUR to 12 million RUR) in January-June 2008.

Uralmash Machine-Building Corporation nearly completed part of the contract it signed with Mikhailovskiy ore mining and processing enterprise. The contract provides for the construction of a roast machine facility needed for the enterprise’s pellet plant. Uralmash has to provide their customer with the process procedure description and the main designing solutions. The spokesperson for the corporation reports their experts are about to complete all the design documentation for the roast machine (the facility’s biggest and most complex unit) and the balling drums. These pieces of machinery are

Central Bank of Russia reports volume of private individuals’ deposits and other investments in Pervouralsk Joint Stock Commercial Bank valid for 31 to 90 days dropped by 50% (from 6.277 million RUR to 3.138 million RUR) in January-June 2008.

‘We cannot provide any comments at the moment; no sales agreement has been signed so far, and I believe the whole thing might take up to a month to get through with,’ says Demidov Business Center’s press officer Oleg Zemtsov. In the meantime, Ural Mining & Metallurgical Company (UMMC) is rumored to have bought 50% of KlaasStroy’s shares (the latter being Demidov’s current developer). The business center’s representatives denied any chance of their signing a contract with UMMC as early as July 8, 2008. They claimed UMMC was not investing anything in the construction process and never

Bread and bakery products keep growing increasingly expensive in Sverdlovsk Region: Yekaterinburg’s bread-making plant reported white bread was to go up by 4% and would be sold for 20.55 RUR per kilogram. Bread made of mixed flour would grow 5% more expensive and would be available for 19.73 RUR per kilogram (compared with the earlier price of 18.8 RUR). The bakery plants located in the region’s other towns followed suit. The bread-makers claim the price increase is brought about by greater production costs. At the same time, the increase must also have to do with the lifting of the wheat and

Russian banks did not set up any new subsidiaries in June 2008 but managed to build up on their authorized capital at the same time. The Bank of Russia reports 1,125 banks with a total of 3,940 subsidiaries operated in Russia on July 1, 2008. Their total authorized capital amounted to 787 billion RUR on July 1, 2008 compared with 780 billion RUR on June 1, 2008, 731 billion on January 1, 2008, 761 billion RUR in March 2008, and 775 billion RUR in May 2008. According to the Bank of Russia, the banks’ distribution density has remained the same over the last few months. Sverdlovsk Region, for

According to the National Managers’ League’s profitability ranking of unit investment trusts as of July 16, 2008, the share price of LUKoil Fund (Uralsib Management Company) has gone down by 19.35% since the beginning of the year.

A number of Yekaterinburg’s private clinics are uniting to fight for their right to become a part of the obligatory medical insurance system, General Director of Babur Medical Center Igor Ivanenko says. ‘We decided to work together on the new scheme of rendering medical services. Private clinics (dealing in a variety of services) are to cooperate with one another, which means a patient will be entitled to a whole range of medical services, including primary health care, expert and hi-tech medical care, and transportation services,’ he explains. Igor Ivanenko claims the idea of a united system

‘8,775 foreign citizens have had to face administrative liability for violating the foreign worker regime in Sverdlovsk Region since the beginning of the year. 584 people were working without a license. 390 employers violated the foreign worker employment regulations. Some 130 people were deported from Russia, and over 26 million RUR worth of fines were imposed,’ Head of Sverdlovsk Region’s division of the Federal Migration Service Igor Semochkin announced at a press conference.

Yekaterinburgnefteprodukt and LukoilPermnefteprodukt were found guilty of violating the federal legislation on the protection of competition, Sverdlovsk Region’s Federal Antimonopoly Service’s department director Yulia Anisimova said to UrBC. The two companies have been sued for a price collusion that involved AI 76 (80), AI 95 (96), and diesel fuel. The collusion lasted from January 1, 2007 to March 27, 2008. ‘These are two different organizations, so they work with different oil product suppliers; they have different transportation and storage terms, and so on. This is why they couldn’t

The federal statisticians report 485,400 square meters of housing were put up in Sverdlovsk Region in January-June 2008, which exceeds the figures for a year earlier by 22.8%. 5,168 apartments have been put up altogether (compared with 4,216 apartments in January-June 2007). Twenty-five municipalities, including Yekaterinburg, Asbest, Sysertskiy district, Beloyarskiy district, and Nevyanskiy district, did particularly well and managed to raise their housing construction output by 1.3, 2.4, 2, 1.4, and 2.1 times, respectively. The region’s dwellers managed to have 278,600 square meters worth

Koltsovo airport of Yekaterinburg offers some of Russia’s priciest jet fuel. In fact, the price went up by over 30% in just one year and now comes to 30,600 RUR per ton or 37,194 RUR per ton if you count the price of the filling and maintenance. This is more than Moscow-based Domodedovo or airports based next to health resorts like Sochi, Anapa, and Mineralniye Vody charge their customers. The soaring prices have already made the plane tickets more expensive, with the fuel fee sometimes coming to 20% of the price of a vacation in Turkey or Europe. Consequently, some tourist destinations have

Sberbank of Russia’s Uchalinskiy division is financing the construction of a dairy farm in Urazovo, Uchalinskiy Region. This is Agrofirma Bairamgul’s investment project and part of the national priority program on the development of Russia’s agro-industry. Sberbank has already contributed 86 million RUR to the building and assembly jobs and intends to invest a total of 626 million RUR in the project. Sberbank’s Ural branch has been sponsoring some projects under the program on the development of Russia’s agro-industry since 2006. The bank has offered various agricultural enterprises a total

The Board took a decision on calling an extraordinary shareholders' meeting on August 29, approved its agenda, and determined the format of the meeting, absentee voting. It also approved the list of information to be made available to persons entitled to participation in the meeting. The date of making the list of persons entitled to participation in the meeting is set on July 21 (at close of business). The Board recommended to the Extraordinary Shareholders' Meeting to adopt a resolution on payment of dividends for the 1st half of the 2008 financial year in the amount of RUB 0.382

ROSNO, the insurance company, started making insurance payments to travelers who found themselves dumped by Detour on their vacations. The insurer is currently compensating those who’ve applied for an insurance indemnity and produced all the documents the federal legislation states are needed to prove a breach in contractual obligations and to estimate the damage done to the victim. ROSNO makes up for both the damage caused by the tour operator’s failing to provide a traveler with the necessary papers (tickets, travel pass, hotel reservations, etc), thus making it impossible for a customer to

According to the latest report on the performance of Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, and Chelyabinsk Regions and Perm Territory’s largest banks (available from Bank Severnaya Kazna’s official website), Yekaterinburg Municipal Bank’s own funds went down by 10.3% over the first six months of 2008.

Svyaz-Bank’s Yekaterinburg branch is going to resume offering car loans to its customers no sooner than August 2008, the bank’s call-center reports. One of the bank’s employees says the company’s stopped dealing in car loans for the time being due to the need to edit its automobile lending program.

‘The fact that the bank now turned into an open joint stock company is not likely to affect its market position in any way whatsoever. There are hundreds of close joint stock companies out there that keep developing successfully. Besides, Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank is one of Russia’s Top 200 banks, so it would probably be an exaggeration to say that it cannot compete with some other organization,’ says Alexander Osin, Finam Management’s leading economist. Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank has recently gone through with the official registration of a new type of a joint stock company, switching from

Chelyabinsk-based SOT, a company dealing in production of pipeline bends and part of Rimera (ChTPZ Group’s O&G maintenance division) has been successfully audited by American Petroleum Institute and proved the compliance of its quality management system with the API Specification Q1, API Specification 6H, and ISO/TS 29001 requirements. American Petroleum Institute (API) is the U.S. nongovernmental organization dealing in oil research and development of standards for enterprise’s produce and quality management systems. These standards are accepted in almost every country in the world and