Uralfinprombank’s BOD Chairman Ildar Gubayev suggested that the bank’s stockholders buy out their shareholdings. The proposed price comes to 12 RUR per registered uncertified common share; the decision has to be made within seventy days of the offer. At the moment, Gubayev and his affiliates are reported to have 65.68% of the bank’s shares.

Moscow Court of Arbitration rejected the claims laid by Koltsovo Airport of Yekaterinburg and ruled in favor of the Federal Antimonopoly Service’s decision. The Service declared on September 19, 2008 that the airport had violated Article 10 of the federal bill on the protection of competition (namely, the ban on abuse of dominance) by avoiding signing an agreement with no ground for it. Since the airport was willing to eliminate this violation, no orders were issued, but it was still possible to take legal action, with the administrative charge laid on the basis of Article 14.31 of the

According to RBC.Rating, SKB-Bank crowns Sverdlovsk Region-based banks’ success rating in terms of entities’ deposit volume, consumer lending volume, lending portfolio, and the volume of loans offered to entities. ‘What is more, the bank is one of the best in the area in terms of private individuals’ investment and asset growth dynamics,’ says the bank’s press officer. In addition, SKB-Bank is featured in many of the country’s Top 50 bank ratings. The only Russia’s Top 100 Banks list the bank did not get on was the one compiled on the basis of loan loss.

‘The officers of Yekaterinburg’s Leninskiy District division of Department of Internal Affairs did some drilling within the area right next to our bank’s premises on March 4, 2009. About forty people were involved in the procedure altogether, and it took them around thirty minutes to set the ‘hostages’ free,’ Security Director of Bank Société Générale Vostok’s Yekaterinburg branch Igor Kochegarov said to an UrBC reporter. Meanwhile, a great deal of local dwellers could see a group of militiamen accompanying a few handcuffed people into the car downtown on that same day. All this was happening

The value of Yekaterinburg Municipal Bank’s assets dropped by 14.42% in February 2009, that is, from 6.811 billion RUR on February 1, 2009 to 5.829 billion RUR on March 1, 2009.

Bank24.ru keeps oppressing its own customers through a number of unfriendly policies. For one, the bank’s new tariff schemes provide for a 10% fine in case a customer wants to cash their deposit in before the end of the deposit period. Since charging such a fee directly is actually illegitimate and violates the Russian Federation Civil Code, Bank24.ru appears to have found a way out by introducing a ‘hidden commission’. This means that upon signing a deposit agreement, a customer also has to sign an additional contract which states that, in case the customer chooses to get the money back

The value of Uralfinprombank’s assets went down by 900.068 million RUR, or 16.7%, that is, from 5,385,381,000 RUR on February 1, 2009 to 4,485,513,000 RUR on March 1, 2009. The issuer explains the decrease in asset value has to do with transferring the sums listed under last year’s Fiscal Effect rubric into the last year’s Profit one.

Bank Severnaya Kazna’s assets went down by 526.743 million RUR (from 36,039,329,000 RUR to 35,512,586,000 RUR) in February 2009. These data are available from TRUST’s Trust interactive: Russian banks report.

‘We feel the state might create and stimulate the demand for certain sectors’ produce or for certain projects through a balanced and efficient policy. This is why, in our opinion, the government should focus on the building industry for the time being, which we see as the efforts aimed at developing the infrastructural sector,’ said Delovaya Rossiya Chairman Boris Titov at a Stolypin Club meeting. ‘Some large-scale projects might look as both appealing and well-calculated long-term investments. Some of them are only appealing, like the bridge to Russkiy Island, for instance, since the

A number of UC RUSAL’s Sverdlovsk Region-based Ural smelter will probably get transferred to Khakasia, even though the original idea consisted in moving them to the company’s smelter located in Krasnoyarsk. ‘It’s true that we did plan to have our people transferred to Krasnoyarsk, but the smelter there is also experiencing some problems at the moment, and some people are being made redundant. We’ve reached an agreement with our branch in Sayanogorsk, Khakasia, where a new plant is to open in the spring. A portion of Ural smelter’s employees might end up working there in May,’ the enterprise’s

URSA Bank had bought out over $274m worth of its Eurobonds by March 1, 2009. The company started out with the process at the end of 2008, announcing that the bank was prepared to buy the bonds from four of its issues on both the pubic market and through private transactions. The first $351m-bond issue is to be retired in May 2009, the second one, with face value of 4.5 billion Hungarian forints, is to be retired in September 2009, the ?400m is to be retired in May 2010, and the last ?300m one is to be retired in November 2011. ‘We are buying out our own bonds despite the market’s current

‘The State Retirement Fund undergoes various inspections on a regular basis, including those carried out by the prosecution authorities. The fund makes the pension payments either through a bank or by post, depending on each particular retiree’s preferences. All of the fund’s intermediaries are for-profit organizations. So, first, the money was transferred to the Russian Post; then, the post placed the money with Bank VEFK-Ural,’ the Russian Federation Retirement Fund’s Sverdlovsk Region division CEO Sergey Dubinkin said in the course of a recent press conference in Yekaterinburg. In the

The state-run Vnesheconombank is to offer Koltsovo Airport of Yekaterinburg a 2.25-billion-ruble loan to help the airport complete the international airways terminal and the railway platform as well as to pay off the short-term debts. The bank was officially reported to have allocated 1.4 billion RUR for loan payments, while the total sum of the transaction comes to over 5.17 billion RUR (this covers the credit line’s volume, the interest for using the loan, and the loan commission).

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) put the development of its oxygen facilities on the company’s priority projects list. According to the enterprise’s PR Department, their oxygen shop’s primary consumers (the blast furnace shop, the steel-smelting shop, and the oxygen converter shop) were forced to cut down dramatically on their outputs at the end of last year. The company was then capable of producing 45,000 cubic meters of oxygen an hour, whereas the equipment’s estimated capacity came to as many as 270,000-280,000 cubic meters an hour. Only four out of ten machines were in actual

Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, placed Russian landline operator Uralsvyazinform’s long-term credit rating (namely, BB-) on the CreditWatch list, with Negative Rating Outlook. ‘This has reflected our concerns over the way the company’s liquid assets are managed; we actually feel that it’s a bit too harsh,’ says Standard & Poor’s analyst Alexander Gryaznov. ‘We believe the operator is going to retire its three-billion-ruble bond issue on time at the end of March using the remainder of the available money and short-term credit lines. However, we did expect the company to refinance

Bank Monetniy Dom has recently come up with a special offer for its customers, popularly dubbed ‘Plus 1% Interest Guarantee. Under the terms of the offer, every customer who opens an Interest Guarantee deposit type at the bank on March 4-10, 2009 will be offered a one percent increase in the annual interest rate offered on this deposit type. ‘Our Interest Guarantee scheme provides for the so-called gradual interest rate that depends on the amount of time the money has been in the bank’s account. There is no topping up option, whereas the interest gets capitalized every thirty or sixty-one

Sredneuralsk Metallurgical Plant owes over 58 million RUR to one of the local banks, which is why the latter laid a claim against the company, demanding that care should be taken for the bank to get its money back. Sverdlovsk Region Court of Arbitration ruled that the plant’s machinery should be arrested. Therefore the local division of the Officers of Justice Service had 9,557,014 RUR worth of the plant’s property registered and arrested on February 24, 2009. This was done in compliance with the court’s order and on the basis of the Federal Laws 229 and 118 regarding the enforcement

‘We still haven’t been given the loan needed to put up The Ukraine Hotel on Yekaterinburg-Koltsovo Road. All the papers have been filled in and submitted, but the authorities keep finding some new faults with us. Moreover, we’ve already paid a 2.5 million-ruble commission on the loan we never got. So far, we’ve managed to find 64 million RUR, but we still need the loan resources,’ Uralzarubezhservis GD Petr Shcherbina announced at Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel’s conference on construction issues. ‘We cannot have the water supply infrastructure installed because they insist on

Bankir.ru’s experts looked into the Russian banking sector’s last year’s successes and failures, with the emphasis laid on the investments made by private individuals. Their research has shown that the volume of private customers’ deposits increased by 16.9% in 2008, which was actually only a half of what the experts had predicted earlier. Then, the deposit volume growth only came to .1% in September through December 2008. Nevertheless, some of the provincial banks managed to keep their performance up in spite of the dropping demand for the deposit products; besides, these banks were actually

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin commented upon the results of the recent municipal-level elections in the region. The spokesperson for the Governor reports Petr Sumin basically approved of the election campaign’s results, saying that now the elections have been through with, the mayors and the deputies have to get down to work and prove as good as their word. He also praised the region’s and town-scale election committees’ work and said the voters deserved a special thanks for turning up in such great numbers this year.