The household appliances and electronic goods store Technosila closed down its outlet in Fan Fan Shopping Mall in Yekaterinburg. The store has already been replaced by another chain, Eldorado. This means Technosila now operates only two stores in Yekaterinburg, that is, in Greenwich and Park House malls. In fact, the outlet in Park House might soon stop operating as well. Manhattan Real Estate Management’s Yekaterinburg branch informed UrBC that yet another electronic goods chain, Media Markt, is about to open on the third floor of the mall. The German hypermarket is expected to use the area

Sverdlovsk Region’s Minister for Public Property Management Vitaly Nedelsky will not take part in the re-election of Koltsovo Airport’s Board of Directors by the stockholders. The decision was made by the airport’s BOD. It was suggested that Sverdlovsk Region should be represented on the board by Deputy Head of Sverdlovsk Region Government and Head of Administration Pavel Korolev and Transport & Roads Minister Gennady Marenkov. Nedelsky and Marenkov were both elected on the airport’s BOD in September 2011 in the course of an extraordinary general meeting.

Last year, Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) invested over 120m RUR in employee training. 12,883 employees took part in various professional development, re-training, and second specialization programs, including 6,747 blue-collar workers and 6,136 managers, experts, and clerks. The majority of workers (4,241 people) attended purpose-oriented courses last year, while 1,603 people underwent re-training programs, 339 people attended production & technical courses, and 564 people obtained a second qualification. MMK’s employee training spending amounted to 121.3m RUR last year. In

The agenda of Design Managers’ Days (to be held in Yekaterinburg on February 25-26, 2012) covers some work on the logo for Ural IT Cluster, a non-profit partnership. The event will be attended by experts from British Higher School of Art & Design, Parsons The New School For Design, the Association of Design Management, Ural State University of Economics’ Marketing & International Management Department, and Arena Multimedia International Training Center as well as employees of BridgerConway, StreetArt, Vitamin, and AMG An intensive workshop dubbed Brand Design: A Step-by-Step Guide

Baltika Breweries intends not to pay any share dividends for the year 2011 to the stockholders. Such was the recommendation offered to the shareholders by the company’s Board of Directors.

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court fined Metro Cash & Carry for selling foods that did not meet the normative documentation requirements; the fine amounted to 50,000 RUR and meant that the court ruled in favor of the claim laid against the company by Sverdlovsk Region division of Rospotrebnadzor in Leninsky and Verkh-Isetsky districts of Yekaterinburg. Rospotrebnadzor (the consumer rights agency) insisted that the retailer face administrative liability and that the following food items be confiscated: canned Atlantic sardines in oil (produced at Baltiysky Kombinat, Svetly, Kaliningrad

Russian businesspeople find it more convenient to invest in the Urals’ economy through Cyprus. This was a hypothesis voiced by head of the Cyprus-based construction company Cybarco Ural representation Vladislav Andreyev, who looked into the data carried by Tyumenstat, the company’s press service reports. According to the statistics agency, 99.7% of investments Tyumen Region (excluding Khanty-Mansiysky and Yamalo-Nenetsky Autonomous Regions) receives come from Cyprus. All in all, these went up by 209.1 times, that is, from $26.3m to $5,472.4m. It is remarkable, Andreyev notes, that the number

Rosatom is considering the possibility of installing two more fast fission reactors at Beloyarskaya nuclear power station in Sverdlovsk Region, to complement the BN-800 reactor currently under construction, RIA Novosti refers to head of Rosatom Sergey Kiriyenko as saying. The nuclear station currently uses the world’s only fast fission reactor-based power generating unit that has an industrial-scale capacity, BN-600. The BN-800 fast fission reactor-based unit is under construction at the moment. The first portion of fuel is expected to be loaded into this reactor in the middle of 2013.

The National Agency for Control and Welding (NAKS) conducted a certification procedure for the OZS-4 and MR-3 electrodes manufactured by MMK METIZ (a member of MMK Group) at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. At the end of the certification procedure, certificates confirming the quality of the said products were issued to the manufacturer. The certification means MMK METIZ can now sell its Type E46 OZS-4 and MR-3 electrodes (diameter of 3.0 and 4.0 mm) bearing NAKS Compliance Sign, the company’s press service reports. The Sign is meant to inform the customer that the produce complies

Ural Airlines announces a drop in prices for the company’s Moscow-Chita and Chita-Moscow flights. Prices for a one-way ticket now start from 9,150 RUR. The offer is valid between February 16 and May 20 and applies to all the flights operated in the said directions, the airline’s press service reports. It should be noted that Ural Airlines is one of the major air carriers at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport and operates flights to various parts of Russia as well as around the CIS. This is why passengers flying from Chita to Moscow can get on connecting flights via a convenient transit in Moscow.

Russkiye Samotsvety Plant placed an insolvency application with Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court. They ask for Ulyana Nikulina of the Interregional Self-Regulatory Organization of Trustees in Bankruptcy Association, a non-profit partnership, to become their trustee in bankruptcy. The preliminary court hearing has been scheduled for March 6, 2012. The plant was set up in 2007 out of a joint stock company called Russkiye Samotsvety and is now a member of FinPromCo.

Chairman of Sverdlovsk Region Government Anatoly Gredin held a meeting at AMUR car factory’s production site in order to discuss the ways of getting the company out of financial trouble. Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court looked into AMUR’s application for an extension of bankruptcy proceedings for six months and ruled that the company should indeed undergo these proceedings. The court, however, did not take into account the application accepted by the voting majority of the plant’s creditors. The bankruptcy proceedings will be in progress for six months and will be over on July 20, 2012. A

The court hearing of Uralvtorchermet vs. Avtoland Sever has been set for March 12, 2012. The plaintiff insists on being paid 206.47m RUR. In fact, the claim was placed with Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court by MDM Bank. Nezavisimost Group informed UrBC earlier that the money in question is the debt to the bank resulting from some loan agreements or collateral agreements. The company is now negotiating with the bank regarding the possibility of buying out some of the former Avtoland Group’s debts, but they are not prepared to offer any comment on the success of the talks yet. Now

Yekaterinburg-based VSM-2 EngineeringCompany is planning to coordinate a tender for the construction of a high-speed railway connecting Moscow, Nizhniy Novgorod, Kazan, and Yekaterinburg (VSM-2) late in 2012, the company’s Director-General Denis Muratov told Interfax. The engineering company is currently working on all the necessary documentation that has to be handed over to the future bidders. Muratov says the company has already received two applications for the tender from a consortium of companies based in France and Germany. Five more applications from businesses in China, South Korea,

A tender aimed at deciding on the interest rate on the first coupon of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) bonds (Series BO-08, totaling to 5bn RUR, in circulation for three years and with an eighteen-month offer period) was coordinated yesterday. The bond issue is now listed in MICEX Quotation List B. Investors made over 13bn RUR worth of bids altogether, which means the issue was oversubscribed by more than 2.5 times. All in all, 137 bids were submitted in the course of the tender. In the end, the interest rate on the first coupon of MMK s bonds was set at 8.19% a year, which was in

Tyumen Region Arbitration Court sustained the claim placed by Rosimuschestvo against UTair Aviation Company; the state agency denied the airline’s ownership rights over the airfield of Plekhanovo Airport in Tyumen, the Russian Agency for Legal & Court Information reports. The court also confirmed the Russian Federation’s ownership rights over the air field, whose total area comes to 98.7 hectares. The claim was placed with the court by Khanty-Mansiysky Autonomous Region Yugra division of the Federal Agency for State Property Management (Rosimuschestvo). The defendant asked the court to

Х5 Retail Group is not planning to sell its Karusel supermarket chain to Wal-Mart, Interfax reports. The company’s analysts sent out a letter that states the retailer is not negotiating for the sale of the chain. In fact, the company’s CEO Andrei Gusev also informed Interfax earlier that the X5 had no intention of selling Karusel and was actually planning on developing the chain further in order to make the business even more efficient. The Group runs three Karusel stores in Yekaterinburg: in Park House, ComsoMALL, and Alatyr shopping malls.

Ural Airlines is planning to suggest that Sverdlovsk Region authorities co-pay the international flights that are not fully sold out, the air carrier’s Director-General Sergey Skuratov told Interfax-Ural. He said this kind of state-private cooperation was practiced in Chelyabinsk Region, where flights from Chelyabinsk to Harbin and from Chelyabinsk to Vienna receive regional budget subsidies. ‘Subsidies decrease as the seat occupancy goes up. At some point, there comes a moment when subsidies are cut out as the passenger load factor reaches a certain level that ensures a positive balance

Ural Federal University is trying to prevent the registration of the domain name urfu.ru with the help of Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court. Russia’s First President B.N. Yeltsin Ural Federal University placed a claim against Oleg Bartov and a company called Domain Name Registration. The university representatives insist that Oleg Bartov be forbidden to use the name of urfu in the domain name urfu.ru within the Web and that Domain Name Registrator REG.RU stop registering urfu.ru in the name of Oleg I. Bartov. The court hearing has been set for February 21, 2012. As a matter of fact, the

Chelyabinsk Iron & Steel Works dumped 62,900 tons of pollutants in the air in 2010. This discharge figure was the one of the largest among all of Chelyabinsk Region-based enterprises in 2010. These data are available from the public report on the state of and protection of the environment in the Russian Federation in 2010. The public report on the state of and protection of the environment in the Russian Federation in 2010 was prepared by Russia’s Ministry for Natural Resources & the Environment in cooperation with the NGO International Projects Center, the interested ministries,