Bank CIT Finance BOD approved of the terms of the agreement the bank is to sign with Bank VTB 24 regarding the sale of the bulk of its mortgage portfolio. The portfolio amounts to 34bn RUR. The agreement will probably be completed before the end of 2011 through a transfer of mortgages to Bank VTB 24 in several stages. All the money thus obtained will be directed to paying the bank’s creditors, namely, the Deposit Insurance Agency State Corporation and Russian Railways Public Company,’ says Chairman of Bank CIT Finance BOD Yuri Novozhilov.

Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport’s Board of Directors was unable to decide on any recommendations to the stockholders regarding the scale and the payment of dividends for the year 2010. In the meantime, the annual general meeting took place the other day, the company reports.

The Dubai-Yekaterinburg flight by Flydubai that was called off the day before is now expected to arrive at 2:20 PM. The Yekaterinburg-Dubai flight is therefore expected to take off at 3:05 PM. The said flight was cancelled the other day. According to the airline representatives, the route between Dubai and Yekaterinburg turned out to be dangerous because of the volcanic ashes concentration in the air. We took the experts’ advice and cancelled the scheduled flight between Dubai and Yekaterinburg,’ the airline’s press officer reports.

MMK Group is expected to save over 9m RUR this year due to the energy-saving measures launched at the group’s enterprises in the first quarter of 2011. For one, Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) runs programs on reducing energy spending every year. Most of the measures were targeted at saving electric power. These included replacing the older light bulbs with the new, energy-saving ones, installing new electrical machinery instead of the old power-hungry type, and improving on the production processes. In the course of one year, the savings will amount to nearly 1.8m kilowatt-hours,

The copper enterprise Uralectromed’s Board of Directors recommended that the stockholders vote for passing the last year’s dividends in the course of the annual general meeting. The AGM took place today, May 25, 2011. Uralelectromed is the key asset of Ural Mining & Metallurgical Company.

Supporting the ruling of the court of appeals, a cassational court stated that Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service’s Sverdlovsk Region division imposing a fine on the Bank of Moscow for violating the existing antimonopoly legislation had been legitimate. The bank has already paid the 370,430-ruble fine to the federal budget for violating the antimonopoly agreement. The administrative offense action was taken when the FAS’s Sverdlovsk Region division detected an instance of the antimonopoly legislation violation on the part of the Bank of Moscow.

Khanty-Mansiysky Bank put off the date of launching its 5bn RUR bond issue BO-01 for an indefinite period of time, Kommersant refers to the bank as reporting. It was announced earlier that the bond offer auction was supposed to have taken place on May 26, 2011. The bank had meant to go through with 5 million bonds with a face value of 1,000 RUR each by public subscription. The bank’s press officer informed Kommersant that ‘the bank currently has enough recourses at its disposal to implement its development programs and needs no additional means at the moment.

The revenues of UTair Engineering (UTair Airlines’ daughter enterprise), calculated in accordance with the Russian Accounting Standards, declined by 6.8% in January-March 2011 compared with the first quarter of 2010 and came to 407.1m RUR, the company reports. The net loss amounted to 307.39m RUR, which was 94% more than in the first quarter of 2010. The company explains the net loss has to do with the expenses exceeding the profits.

A 30,000-ruble fine was imposed on Sky Express recently for delaying a number of flights to the Czech Republic in March 2010, the spokesperson for Moscow public prosecution authorities for transportation reports. It has been determined that, in contradiction to the federal law regulations, the said airline had been scheduling international chartered flights and selling plane tickets without obtaining a permission to operate these flights first,’ the authorities’ report states. The air carrier’s actions resulted in a delay of two chartered flights (Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport – Pardubice, the

The international rating agency Standard & Poor's affirmed Norilsk Nickel’s long-term credit rating and its national scale rating at ВВВ- and ruAA+, respectively. The ratings were also taken off the CreditWatch list, with Negative rating outlook. The fact that the ratings are no longer on the CreditWatch list reflects the official statements the company’s management made to the extent that Norilsk Nickel is not going to suggest buying its shares out from UC RUSAL (which owns a 25% stake in the business) again; the rating agency also feels that the company’s financial performance

The second pilot sample of Granit (Series 2ES10), Russia’s only electric locomotive with an asynchronic tract gear created by Ural Locomotives (Sinara Group and Siemens’s joint venture) has been successfully tested at Sverdlovsk Region Railways in accordance with the technical requirements of Russian Railways Public Company. Head of Sverdlovsk Region Railways Alexei Mironov says the introduction of the new 2ES10 locomotive is particularly important for the coordination of heavy trains at West-Siberian, South-Ural, and Sverdlovsk Region Railways. Thanks to Granit, transit trains of 6,300 kg

The Finance magazine’s analysts drew up a rating of Russian banks’ reliability on the basis of the data available as of the first quarter of 2011. SKB-Bank was promoted by one position, with its reliability rating rising from B+ to BB-. This is the highest rating level reached by Sverdlovsk Region-based banks. The bank’s rating was calculated on the basis of formalized assessments of its assets and liabilities, its capital and liquidity, and on the basis of the qualitative evaluation of the non-financial information available. The rating was affected by such criteria as the dynamics, the

UTair Airlines is planning to close down its subsidiaries in Berezovsky, Noyabrsk, Taz, and Mys-Kamensk. The idea will be considered by the company’s supervisory board on May 27, 2011.

Egypt’s tourist industry is gradually recovering, but Russian holiday-makers appear to be taking their time in heading for the African country’s resorts: in April 2011, the number of Russian tourists in Egypt was 65% less than a year earlier, the director of Egyptian Consulate’s Travel Department Nahid Nazmy Ayad Hanna told RIA Novosti. According to the data, the drop came to 65% in April 2011 against April 2010. This means over 111,000 Russian tourists came to Egypt in April,’ she explained. The official did not specify, however, whether the figure covered only the last three weeks of April,

Rosaviation carried out an unscheduled inspection of NordWind to see whether the company complies with the existing aviation law. The commission was aimed at investigating the circumstances behind the cancellation and delays of 509 flights in the summer of 2010 and the winter of 2010/2011 as well as of flights operated between April 26, 2011 and May 7, 2011, the Association of Russian Tour Operators reports. The airline admitted it had delayed 112 flights due to technical problems, 160 flights because of the need to replace the aircraft or change the slot times, 434 flights due to the

The Finance magazine came up with a ranking of Russia’s largest banks in terms of asset profitability in the first quarter of 2011. The main rating criterion used was ROA, that is, the ratio of the pre-tax profit in the first quarter to the average asset volume in the same three months of the year. SKB-Bank, with its ROA at 3.52%, was among Russia’s top 20 most profitable banks and was given the 16th position on this list. What is more, the bank was rated the most profitable bank in Ural Federal District and second most profitable bank in Sverdlovsk Region. The bank’s net profit reached 712m

Acting Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Anatoly Gredin held a work meeting with the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Turkey to Russia Aydin Sezgin. The diplomat arrived in the mid-Urals to take part in the Turkish Culture Days coordinated by Ural Federal University. Given the volumes of our mutual trade turnover and our investment cooperation potential, as well as the availability of direct flights between Sverdlovsk Region and Turkey, it’s time we set up a Turkish trade representation or a consulate in Yekaterinburg. This would allow us to build up on the business and

UT440, a flight from Tomsk to Moscow operated by UTair, was delayed in Tomsk Airport by five hours, the airport’s interactive announcement board states, according to RIA Novosti. According to the original timetable, the plane was to leave for Moscow at 7 AM local time (4 AM Moscow time), but the departure was put off until noon (9 AM Moscow time). The interactive announcement board only says that the security check has been completed. Tomsk Airport information center explains that the flight was delayed due to technical problems with the aircraft.

Gosstroynadzor (the state construction surveillance agency) experts and the representatives of Yekaterinburg municipal council as well as officials from the city’s district councils completed their examination of the sanitary condition of the local construction sites. Gosstroynadzor’s local division reports a number of developers have to fix things at once: RSU-37 must bring things to order at an apartment block site in Krasnolesye St, Uralmashstroy needs to work on an educational facility/underground garage site in Gagarin St and Botanicheskaya St, Stroytech has to take care of a shopping

Pufico is closing down its representation in Yekaterinburg without having met its customer obligations. The company’s show room, currently located at Gulliver furniture store, will work for one last day tomorrow, the company told UrBC reporters. We are going to call our customers and inform them of the closure tomorrow,’ Pufico reports. This Yekaterinburg furniture shop received some money in advance but never delivered the orders. Its customers have been struggling for a while now, trying to get the furniture or their money back. According to Pufico’s employees, a factory in Miass,