‘Sverdlovsk Region is a special region in terms of its development, given particularly the number of locals who fly abroad. Our task is to make Yekaterinburg an easy-to-reach city. All the airplanes we buy can operate flights to any destination on the globe, and we are planning to get some long-distance aircraft like Airbus A330 or Boeing 767 that will make it possible to travel non-stop to places like Japan. I am positive that these plans will be carried out,’ General Director of Ural Airlines Sergey Skuratov said at a press conference in Yekaterinburg. ‘We launched a scheduled flight to

Following a rock burst at UC RUSAL’s Severouralsk bauxite mine (SUBR), an ad hoc committee checked all the mines for compliance with the security regulations and found now serious damage. All mines are operating as usual at the moment, SUBR’s official representative Roman Lukichev informed UrBC. The rock burst occurred at Krasnaya Shapochka mine at 8:40 AM on February 13, 2010. The mine was closed at the time, so no one was hurt. No damage was done to the nearby towns of Severouralsk, Kalya Tretiy Severniy, or Cheremukhovo, either.

OAO National Bank Trust is going to close down its subsidiaries in Ryazan and Irkutsk, with the branches transferred into the category of the bank’s Lipetsk and Barnaul subsidiaries’ retail outlets, respectively. Therefore the bank’s BOD ruled that Chairman of the Supervisory Board should place all the necessary papers with the Central Bank of the Russian Federation’s head office in Moscow as well as with the Central Bank’s divisions in Lipetsk and Irkutsk Regions. National Bank Trust says nothing about the future of its Yekaterinburg office so far.

‘Experts are growing increasingly pessimistic about The Industrial Urals-The Polar Urals (a large-scale project on the industrial development of the Urals’ north). The project has been around for five years already and could now come to a halt unless some effective measures are taken. It is essential for the ad hoc work team to control all the field operations,’ General Director of OAO Siberian Scientific Analysis Center Anatoly Brekhuntsov announced at a recent meeting. The meeting was aimed at assessing the implementation of the all-round exploration work scheme for the Northern, the

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) came up with the quality improvement plan for 2010. To make sure the enterprise’s quality management system remains functional and efficient, MMK sets a number of quality targets for the enterprise as a whole and for its departments every year. This year, MMK intends to produce at least 11.2 million tons of metal goods. The company’s production departments are expected to improve the technologies used and thus to use no more than 1,070.2 kg of metal per ton of ready rolled products. Also, the labor productivity is expected to rise to 53.7 nominal tons

Novotel, the French hotel chain, recently opened its 13th four-star hotel in Yekaterinburg. Quite a few local VIPs were invited to attend the opening ceremony, but only two actually showed up. These were Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Alexander Misharin and Sverdlovsk Region Economics Minister Mikhail Maksimov. The General Director of OOO Kesko (the project investor) Evgeniy Bidilo, Accor Group Hotel Management Director Alexis Delaroff, and CEO Novotel were the hosts of the ceremony. Over the last two years, Kesko has invested about $30m in the hotel construction. The company’s CFO Alexander

A twenty-five-year-old woman was detained by the police in Fan Fan shopping mall in Yekaterinburg on Thursday. The woman, who is a Russian subject, had fifty grams of heroin on her, says Head of Sverdlovsk Region Administration of the Federal Drug Turnover Control Service’s Information and PR Group Elena Issayeva. The detainee claimed that a thirty-year-old woman had sold the drugs to her. This person was also detained in the mall. Later on, the police officers inspected the suspected dealer’s apartment in Yasnaya St. and found and confiscated nine packages and two plastic containers full of

‘The management of Bank VTB decided to lay off about 10% of actual employees and cut down on vacancies in both the head office and the subsidiaries. The decision regarding the redundancies was made within the framework of the bank’s expense-cutting program adopted by the Board in November 2008. Under this program, a ban on taking in any more staff has already been introduced,’ the bank’s Yekaterinburg subsidiary reported. ‘The redundancies will be made in strict accordance with the Russian labor laws. The laid-off workers will receive all the legally guaranteed payments and compensations and

‘At the end of 2009, there were eighty-nine developers in Sverdlovsk Region working on 154 projects with the total area of 1.3 million sq m. About 7,140 participatory share construction agreements worth about 43 billion RUR were signed. This is a lot of money that we can be proud of. However, there also exist a lot of private participatory share investors who have been deceived by their developers,’ Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Alexander Misharin said at a meeting in Yekaterinburg. ‘Unfortunately, these people don’t always get enough attention to their problem, even though the authorities

The public activists of Nizhniy Tagil, Sverdlovsk Region, have finished collecting signatures for the petition to the Russian Federation Public Prosecutor’s Office, the President of the Russian Federation Dmitriy Medvedev’s Administration, and Rospotrebnadzor (the state consumer rights watchdog) that calls for looking into the business activity of Russian Standard Bank. The petition was designed by Nizhniy Tagil branch of Russia’s Young Lawyers, a pressure group. The branch’s head Evgeniy Ryakin says 133 signatures were collected within one week, so the petition will soon be sent to the

The top executive of MEGA Yekaterinburg Michael Nilsson has recently left office. The spokesperson for the shopping mall reports Nilsson was appointed the company’s Regional Director. Lilia Nenasheva, former Deputy CEO and Marketing Director, is going to become the new head of MEGA Yekaterinburg. MEGA opened its first store in Yekaterinburg in October 2006.

Deputy Head of the Russian Federation Government Igor Sechin is going to chair a governmental meeting dedicated to the country’s metallurgical business development in Yekaterinburg on February 19, 2010, Head of Pipe Industry Development Fund Alexander Deyneko announced at a briefing on Wednesday. Deyneko said the meeting would be devoted to the industrial branch’s post-recession development and the measures that could help upgrade the business, RIA Novosti reports.

Sverdlovsk Region’s public prosecution authorities and Ural State Assay Surveillance Inspection detected some violations in the way OOO Brilliant and ZAO Supermarket Kirovskiy dealt in precious metals and stones, the spokesperson for the prosecution authorities reports. The inspection of Brilliant revealed that, despite the existing legal norms, the company did not inform Rosfinmonitoring (the state watchdog responsible for counteracting laundering proceeds from criminal activity and terrorist financing) of its transactions. The public prosecution authorities found out that Brilliant failed

A twenty-five-year-old woman was detained by the police in Fan Fan shopping mall in Yekaterinburg on Thursday. The woman, who is a Russian subject, had fifty grams of heroin on her, says Head of Sverdlovsk Region Administration of the Federal Drug Turnover Control Service’s Information and PR Group Elena Issayeva. The detainee claimed that a thirty-year-old woman had sold the drugs to her. This person was also detained in the mall.

‘The management of Bank VTB decided to lay off about 10% of actual employees and cut down on vacancies in both the head office and the subsidiaries. The decision regarding the redundancies was made within the framework of the bank’s expense-cutting program adopted by the Board in November 2008. Under this program, a ban on taking in any more staff has already been introduced,’ the bank’s Yekaterinburg subsidiary reported. ‘The economic recession made it necessary to work more effectively, so some of our processes were improved thanks to the new operational and business methods and launch of

The top executive of MEGA Yekaterinburg Michael Nilsson has recently left office. The spokesperson for the shopping mall reports Nilsson was appointed the company’s Regional Director. Lilia Nenasheva, former Deputy CEO and Marketing Director, is going to become the new head of MEGA Yekaterinburg. MEGA opened its first store in Yekaterinburg in October 2006.

The net profit of OAO VTB Severo-Zapad (Bank VTB’s daughter enterprise) decreased by 1.6 times in 2009, that is, down to 3.8 billion RUR, the bank reports. In 2008, the company’s net profit amounted to 6.04 billion RUR.

The management of OAO Bank24.ru (Life Group’s asset) announced the potential closing down of the bank’s subsidiaries in Yekaterinburg. ‘What matters to us is that a subsidiary should make a profit. If this is not the case, it’s actually easier to close it down and strengthen another one with the released resources,’ Bank24.ru’s Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board Boris Dyakonov said at a recent press conference. Boris Dyakonov did not specify which offices were to stop operating.

The building of Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport’s mail division has been closed down for thirty days because of fire safety violations, reports the spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Region’s Administration of the Federal Court Officers Service. On February 8, 2010, the court officer of Oktyabrskiy district’s division started the enforcement proceedings on the basis of Yekaterinburg’s Oktyabrskiy district court’s ruling; the court declared that the airport was to stop using the building. So Russian Post Federal State Unitary Enterprise is not operating on the airport’s premises at the moment.