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,

Adobe Systems announced the results of its efforts to protect copyright regulations in the Russian Federation in 2011. Last year, most of criminal lawsuits involved those installing and selling pirated software. However, these figures went up considerably against the year 2010: there were 632 installing culprits (against 395 in 2010) and 248 sellers (against 161 in 2010). In 2011, 160 criminal lawsuits were also instituted against the end users (against 111 in 2010). The number of lawsuits involving the users who distributed pirated software via the Internet more than doubled and came to 33

Failing to comply with the safety regulations around the railways caused deaths of 130 people at Sverdlovsk Region Railways last year. In 2011, 233 casualties were registered around Sverdlovsk Region Railways infrastructure network, including 130 victims who were killed. Thanks to Russian Railways’ injury-decreasing programs and safety measures, the total number of those injured dropped by 20% in comparison with the year 2010, while the number of those killed declined by 17.7%. However, avoiding casualties altogether turned out to be impossible.

Ural Airlines is now selling tickets for its summertime flights. Tickets for flights to all destinations are already available for purchase, so the air carrier’s customers can already plan their vacations. All of Ural Airlines’ flights are operated using Airbus A320 aircraft that have a full-scale business class section. Tickets for flights to all destinations can be booked via the airline’s official website www.uralairlines.com and in the booking offices. The number of seats is limited.

Avianova decided not to contest the ruling of Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court regarding the airline’s debt to Koltsovo Airport. Under the existing claim laid by the airport against the company, the court ruled that the airline (currently in demise) has to pay 1.22m RUR worth of debts resulting from the ground servicing of its aircraft.

Kachkanar Ore Mining & Processing Plant (KGOK) Vanadium dumped 71,900 tons of pollutants in the air in 2010. This discharge figure was the one of the largest among all of Sverdlovsk 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

The performance dynamics of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) might prove the best in the metallurgical sector this year, says Nomos-Bank’s analyst Yuri Volov. ‘MMK managed to get a discount on the benchmark price of iron ore on its contract with the main raw stuff supplier, the Kazakhstan-based ENRC. The exact figures are not quoted, it is only reported that the discount is rather ‘impressive’ and that it comes into effect starting from the last quarter of 2011,’ he explains. ‘The terms of ENRC delivering iron ore to MMK were the subject of an animated discussion at the end of last

Nizhniy Tagil Iron & Steel Works dumped 66,100 tons of pollutants in the air in 2010. This discharge figure was the one of the largest among all of Sverdlovsk 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,

Under the existing tenant agreements, H&M is supposed to open its outlets in MEGA Ufa and MEGA Samara in the second quarter of 2012, while outlets in MEGA Parnas, MEGA Yekaterinburg, and MEGA Nizhniy Novgorod will be opened in the third quarter of the year. This means the Swedish brand’s stores will be found in eight MEGA malls in a number of Russian regions. As for Yekaterinburg, H&M stores already operate in Greenwich and ComsoMall shopping malls.

F Event (Formica Company) placed a claim against Innoprom and an NGO called Regional Politics Institute with the arbitration court, Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court’s website states. The company, which used to do business with the defendants in the course of Innoprom 2011 exhibition, insists that the deal effected by loan agreement 2/IRP-311 dated July 19, 2011 be declared invalid; the plaintiff also asks for the consequent procedures for an invalid transaction to be enacted as Innoprom, in the course of going through with the deal, violated the requirements set by the law for large-scale

Russian Direct Investment Fund and Strategic Initiatives Agency are to coordinate a visit of the major international funds’ representatives to Yekaterinburg and their meeting with the regional authorities and the local business community on February 15, 2012, Governor of Sverdlovsk Region’s PR Department reports. The visit is part of a regional tour organized by the two organizations in order to attract long-term foreign investments in Russia’s economy and to improve the country’s investment image one the federal and regional scale. A number of Sverdlovsk Region-based companies will be able