Bank VTB Severo-Zapad’s Board to close down Yekaterinburg-based subsidiary

It was decided in the course of OAO Bank VTB’s extraordinary general meeting that OAO Bank VTB Severo-Zapad should be reorganized through a merger with VTB, the former bank’s reports say. VTB has already confirmed the merging agreement and stated that the company’s creditors should be informed of the news.

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.

‘Banks are already producing redundancy reports. Bank VTB Severo Zapad, for instance, is about to make 189 employees redundant. These are mainly lending experts that were formerly employed in the bank’s subsidiaries,’ says Yekaterinburg Employment Center’s Deputy Director Anatoly Kudryashov. In the meantime, the region’s State Labor Inspection reported as many as twenty-six Sverdlovsk Region-based enterprises had asked a number of people to leave by October 15, 2008.

‘The complete closing down of all the investment projects is unlikely, but most of them will probably either be frozen or reconsidered for the time of the crisis,’ director of Severo-Zapad strategic projects fund Vladimir Knyaginin announced at the 3d interregional conference on the investment projects in the Greater Urals. ‘Projects like the one on the industrial development of the northern parts of the Urals (known as The Industrial Urals-The Polar Urals) were naturally targeted at the metallurgical sector. These enterprises, however, intend to freeze their investment projects for the time

Raiffeisenbank Supervisory Board’s recent meeting resulted in the decision to close down a number of the bank’s regional subsidiaries. For one, the bank’s Kamskiy branch in Perm and Chelyabinskiy branch in Chelyabinsk will be closed in November and December 2009, while Nizhegorodskiy branch in Nizhniy Novgorod and Yeniseyskiy branch in Krasnoyarsk will stop working for the months of December and January.