S7 Group airlines Siberia and Globus rendered their services to 412,260 passengers in January 2011, which was actually 1.9% less than a year earlier, S7 press service reports. The decrease in the number of passenger has to do with the fact that that the Group stopped using four transcontinental Airbus A310 planes fit for 255 people; this was part of the company’s fleet upgrades program. S7 Airlines is currently using thirty-nine aircraft whose average age comes to eight years. The company’s passenger turnover amounted to 915,175,000 passenger-kilometers, its passenger load factor came to 68%,

OAO Rosbank reports some forged bank guarantees are used in Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk by unidentified swindlers. ‘It is reported that increasingly more forged bank guarantees are used to deceive people. The trick works like this: swindlers offer the Russian and foreign businesses representatives fictitious bank guarantees for a certain commission off the total amount. The papers involve figures of up to ?250m’ the bank warns. For one, the forgers are said to be operating in such Russian cities as Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Perm, Ulyanovsk, Yekaterinburg, and Yaroslavl

Microsoft Corporation reports the entire product range will grow a bit more expensive starting March 1, 2011. The company decided to use Russian roubles for all the transactions in the Russian Federation. The conversion of prices into the national currency with a fixed exchange rate will mean all products will go up in price 12%. The rise will involve such box offers as FPP and most corporate licensing products like Open, Open Value, Open Value Subscription, Enterprise Agreement, and Enterprise Agreement Subscription The prospective price-rise date has been set for March 1, 2011.

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court turned down the request of Ural Federal District’s division of the Federal Strong Drinks Market Surveillance Service (Rosalcoholuregulirovaniye) to annul the license of Yekaterinburg wine and champagne producer. The division required that the company’s license be annulled after an inspection of the business. The agency then halted the company’s activity. In fact, similar restrictive measures were taken by Rosalcoholuregulirovaniye in respect of Sredneuralksy wine plant, but the claim was dismissed by the court in this case as well.

The project of Ural Airlines’ new office building won in Golden Capital, the country-wide architects and designers contest. Yekaterinburg-based In.Form, already known for its public buildings projects, won the gold prize with its project for Ural Airlines in the Public Interiors category. The All-Russian festival was attended by 108 companies from nine Russian cities: Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, and others. The event coordinators reports projects of greatest quality were featured there, the best ones throughout the festival’s fifteen years of existence. Virtually all the projects

The tour operators won’t find an increase in the amount of financial guarantees required by the state a big blow on their finances. However, some smaller tour operators will have to become simple travel agents,’ the Director of Mouzenidis Тravel Yekaterinburg representation Olga Ganiyeva told UrBC. The prospective changes in the tourist legislation will make it obligatory for tour operators whose annual turnover falls short of 500m RUR to ensure financial guarantees of 100m; companies whose turnover comes to more than 500m RUR a year and over 1bn RUR a year will have to provide 200m RUR and

I think the new development on the increased financial guarantees for tour operators is only half the battle. Sadly, tourism is a kind of business where there are a lot of illegitimate tour operators. No one can forbid a travel agent to book a ticket and a hotel room on their own. There are no regulations on this market,’ Director of Natalie Tours Yekaterinburg representation Oleg Khiger told UrBC. Now the prospective changes in the tourist legislation will make it obligatory for tour operators whose annual turnover falls short of 500m RUR to ensure financial guarantees of 100m; companies

New Tajikistan’s Consul-General in Yekaterinburg Parviz Asoyev assumed office recently. Parviz Asoyev used to be deputy head of Tajikistan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry’s Consulate Department prior to his new appointment. Mr. Asoyev’s predecessor Farrukh Sharipov was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Tajikistan to Turkey.

I don’t think any financial guarantees can save a tour operator on the brink of bankruptcy. For one, these guarantees did not help much in the case of Capital Tour and its customers. As a result, people were forced to pay for the hotel rooms themselves, they found themselves hostages of the problem. The thing is, Capital Tour still owes money to hotels and airlines. This is why I really do not see how a financial guarantee can save either the tour operator or the client,’ Director of OOO Inna Tour Inna Averyanova told UrBC. Meanwhile, the prospective changes in the tourist legislation will

The Swedish furniture maker IKEA is calling off 6,000 children’s beds due to a production fault. According to the company’s press service, the beds in question, Sniglar, made at IKEA’s Rumania-based factories, are now being called off in Canada. The problem is that the fastening bolts for the beds turned out to be too short; as a result, the beds can collapse and therefore hurt the children. The beds were sold between October 2005 and June 2010, RBC reports. IKEA pointed out that no problems have been recorded up to now. However, the company strongly recommends that all Sniglar beds should be

Raiffeisenbank and RENOVA StroyGroup launched a new mortgage scheme recently that allows one to buy an apartment in Yekaterinburg’s newest Academic district. Customer willing to buy a place there can choose among three mortgage programs, all of which offer such advantageous terms as a 15% down payment, twenty-five years to pay the rest off, no moratorium on or commissions for the early repayment, no need to look for any guarantors or collateral. The bank promises to process the applications within three to five working days. What is more, through a special offer run by Raiffeisenbank between

Flight 947 from Hudzhand by Tajik Air was canceled by the airline and did not arrive at Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport recently. The flight was to have arrived at Koltsovo at 2:30 PM but was called off. No reason is stated on the airport’s interactive announcement board. This means a return flight 4918 from Yekaterinburg to Hudzhand (departure time 4:30 PM) was called off as well.

OAO Acron appealed to Head of Russian Federation Government Vladimir Putin, asking him to forbid the merger of OAO Uralkaliy and OAO Sylvinite, Vedomosti reports. Acron President Ivan Antonov has sent two letters to Putin so far. The first one is a request to forbid the merger of two companies of any kind; the second one is a proposal that Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service should refuse Uralkaliy’s request to allow the merger with Sylvinite and that Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service should look into the two companies’ compliance with the joint stock companies, securities, and

The Egyptian authorities placed an official request with Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking to reconsider their recommendation that Russian tourists shouldn’t be traveling to Egypt for the time being. The news was reported by the Egyptian Ambassador to Russia Alaa El-Hadidi in the course of a conference with the Russian tour operators. The Ministry, however, is reluctant to let Russians go to Egypt. Rostourism head Alexander Radkov says Egypt might become a welcome country very soon, but flights to Egypt are highly unlikely to be resumed in the next couple of days.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 17, 2011. ‘The creation of Titanium Valley, a special economic zone, is a new development direction for Sverdlovsk Region. In fact, with a clever approach the Valley can serve as a great starting point for the development of the hosting area,’ President of Sverdlovsk Region Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Dmitri Pumpyansky observed in the course of the union meeting. ‘It is however obvious that Titanium Valley gets no actual residents just yet: the conditions aren’t ripe enough, the infrastructure isn’t ready, the financing is still a dubious matter.

ZAO Russian Copper Company was notified by its shareholder Russian Copper Company Ltd. (RCC), that the latter had sold a 20% shareholding in Russian Copper Company Ltd to a Russian businessman Ruslan Baisarov. Baisarov will now become a member of the company’s BOD. ZAO Russian Copper Company was set up by Igor Altushkin in 2004. The group’s trading house manages the RCC Holding’s assets; it is now Russia’s third largest manufacturer of pure copper. Its production capacity comes to 200,000 tons of copper cathodes and 190,000 tons of copper wire rods a year. The company relies on its own raw

The daughter enterprise of TNK-BP TNK-Nyagan was made by the court to pay a fine of 3.3m RUR for damage to and extermination of soil on the area of 1 hectare. Rosprirodnadzor (the state environmental watchdog) carried an inspection of the company in 2009 and detected that in 2004 a strip of forest on the licensed land allotment that TNK-Nyagan had been using was contaminated with mineral oil. The agency estimated that, under the existing Forestry Code, the company was to have provided for the technological and biological reclamation of soil, but none of this ever happened. This is why

he travel agents based in the Urals keep waiting for the compensation payments from Capital Tours; the payments are to be made for the tourists whose travel expenses were covered by the agents themselves. According to the insurer Innogarant, the payments were supposed to have started in February 2011, but for the time being the company is just busy returning the applicants’ papers back for improvement. ‘Our application package was placed with Capital Tours as early as December 2010. Some of the papers have been given back to us because of some filling-in slips. What’s more, we still cannot

Starting February 15, 2011, Hungarian Consulate General in Yekaterinburg will be offering travelers Schengen Visas on behalf of the Kingdom of Denmark. ‘The terms of getting a Danish visa are no different from the general Schengen visa requirements. The visas are issued in accordance with the rules of the Schengen agreement given that all the documents required by the signers are provided. Hungarian Consulate General is allowed to issue short-term visas to Denmark if the visitors intend to stay for no longer than ninety days there,’ the consulate reports. Hungarian Consulate General in

Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service decided that the issue of Mid-Urals Development Corporation’s ordinary registered paperless shares should be resumed and the report on the additional share issue results should be registered with the Service. The shares were available via a private offering. The issue amounts to two million shares, with face value of 1,000 RUR apiece. This means the issue is worth 2bn RUR altogether.