The Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviation) came up with a report on the flights delayed by airlines over the last few months. According to the agency’s data, SkyExpress put off a quarter of all the flights it operated in August 2010, thus becoming the top flights delayer among all the Russian air carriers. Rosaviation reports SkyExpress operated 947 flights in August altogether, including 235 delayed ones. What is more, forty-eight of these delayed flights (thirty-four scheduled ones and fourteen chartered ones) were put off by more than six hours.

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service took legal action against the Russian Federation Social Security Fund as the latter is suspected of violating the existing antimonopoly legislation, the spokesperson for the Service reports. The fund’s charges are based on Article 17 (part 2) of the Competition Protection law (denying access to taking part in a tender). ‘It is believed that the fund insists that all the bidders, who are supposed to deliver computer appliances to the company, make sure all the computers run on Intel microprocessors,’ the spokesperson explains.

Sverdlovsk Region Government’s Environment and Nature Management Committee looked into the conservation program of Nizhniy Tagil Iron & Steel Works (NTMK). It was reported at the committee’s meeting that the enterprise was still one of Sverdlovsk Region’s top twenty air polluters. ‘Up to 60% of the air in Nizhniy Tagil consists of pollutants emitted by NTMK, and the quality of this air has not improved a bit over the last few years, according to the data available from the automatic air monitoring tests,’ the committee members stated.

‘Preliminarily, we can say the cause of the fire at Ganina Yama monastery was stove heating mismanagement,’ the representatives of Russia’s Department of Emergencies announced at a press briefing dedicated to the accident in the temple on the premises of the monastery at Ganina Yama site. The DoE officials said that, in principle, the temple could be restored, since the foundation and the east entrance had remained intact. However, the valuables reportedly situated in the temple were lost forever. The valuables in question might comprise the icon of Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker that used

It has been detected that recently that OAO Uralmashzavod/Ural Heavy Machine-Building Plant is not storing its documents in the way prescribed by the law, so Ural Federal District’s division of the Federal Financial Markets Service imposed a 200,000-ruble fine on the company.

The Cyprian authorities, who proposed introducing a Consulate-General in Yekaterinburg, intend the establishment to serve as the regional visa application center that will render its services to the dwellers of Ural Federal District, The Republic of Cyprus’s Minister for Trade, Industry, and Tourism Antonis Pashalidis said at his meeting with acting Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Anatoly Gredin. The meeting was mainly dedicated to issues related to the introduction of the consulate in Yekaterinburg and to the prospects of Cyprus and Sverdlovsk Region’s trade and economic relations. Now

The analysts of the Delovoy Kvartal magazine came up with a top list of Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovsk Region-based banks that did best in terms of consumer lending volumes as of July 1, 2010. OAO SKB-Bank proved one of the first local banking organizations in terms of total lending portfolio volume and the bank with the largest volume of loans issued to private individuals. The magazine analysts report SKB-Bank offered a total of 8.227 billion RUR worth of loans to private customers by July 1, 2010. The bank’s grand lending portfolio comprises 7.5 billion RUR worth of consumer loans and about

Summertime is the traditional vacation period when all the business activity goes through a downfall of sorts. Nevertheless, these summer months have been special in that the gradual economic recovery and the increasing demand for goods and services made the business community feel more optimistic than usual. Now that borrowing money has grown cheaper it looks both possible and profitable. As a result, small and medium enterprises are taking out increasingly more bank loans. ‘We offered thrice as many loans to SMEs in August 2010 than we did at the beginning of the summer, and the demand for

Over 420,000 foreigners visited Yekaterinburg in January-September 2010, which was actually 27,000 more than in the year 2009. It has been estimated that 539,000 foreign citizens will have visited the city by the end of the year 2010, says Ilona Starodubtseva, Deputy Mayor of Yekaterinburg Viktor Konteev’s press secretary. As a matter of fact, 48% of foreigners arrive in Yekaterinburg to get hired, 31% come on private visits, 19% have business to do here, 2.6% come as tourists, and 2% intend to study here. Experts report Yekaterinburg has developed a great tourism-hosting and international

‘I’m not going to resign unless I feel positive that the new city-managing system is viable,’ Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy announced at a press conference in the town hall. Chernetskiy also said the idea of a people-elected mayor who’d also chair the municipal Duma plus a Duma-appointed head of the administration looked good to him. The mayor added that the current system had a lot of advantages; for one, it protected Yekaterinburg from incompetent people in power. He stressed that any changes in the way a city is administered had to be made extremely carefully. Arkadiy

President of MMK Management Company Viktor Rashnikov signed an order for pay rises at Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (ММК). The increase in wages and salaries will go along the wage-growth program adopted by the company. For one, the pay of workers, managers, white-collar experts, and clerks will go up 10%. This is the second time the enterprise’s employees have got a pay rise this year, as the wages and salaries went up 10% in March 2010. All in all, MMK is expected to spend about 1 billion RUR on wage increases in the year 2010. ‘Even now, when times are still a bid hard, we manage to

OAO Uralgipromez raised its shareholding in OOO Upravlyayuschaya Proyektnaya Kompaniya up to 36.74%. Prior to this stock expansion, Uralgipromez used to own 15.44% of the company’s stock. The shares were sold to the enterprise by OOO Forpost Company. The transaction is estimated to be worth 95.37 million RUR.

899 instances of car theft and 1,025 hijackings were registered in Sverdlovsk Region in eight months of 2010. As for the month of August, fifty-two foreign automobiles were stolen, with Toyota proving the most frequently stolen car make: twenty Toyotas went missing in the region altogether. VAZ 2106-2165 and VAZ 2101-2103 car makes were the second most ‘popular’ models: all in all, seventy-eight such automobiles were stolen this August.

‘Sverdlovsk Region’s division of the Federal Antimonopoly Service is going to place the report on the investigation involving OAO Yekaterinburg Oil Plant’s pricing policies with our Service’s Moscow headquarters,’ the spokeswoman for Sverdlovsk Region’s division of the Federal Antimonopoly Service Marina Yusupova said to UrBC. The Service’s regional division came up with a report on the weekly price monitoring research regarding basic food items recently. ‘The price of vegetable oil produced by OAO Yekaterinburg Oil Plant went up the most: in fact, it soared by 28.42%. The oil plant reports

OAO Severstal insists that OAO Uralvagonzavod starts making a 100% prepayment on its rolled metal products orders starting the last quarter of 2010, Kommersant reports. A letter explaining this demand was sent to Uralvagonzavod the day before. The change in the terms of contract was brought about by the ‘serious payment deadline problems on the part of the plant without any explanations as to the reasons for such practices’. The metallurgical enterprise’s representative refused to quote the exact amount of debt but did say that the deadline had been missed by eight days as of September 9,

OAO Ural Airlines has recently been declared Russia’s leading air carrier. The winners of the 6th Golden Chariot National Transport Prize were awarded in the course of a solemn ceremony in Moscow. The prize was introduced by the State Duma’s Energy, Transport & Communications Committee and Russia’s Transportation Ministry. A board of experts picked out the best companies among several hundred transportation enterprises and awarded prizes in several categories related to the country’s various transportation branches. Ural Airlines won the prize in the Russia’s Leading Air Carrier category.

RENOVA-StroyGroup’s Academic construction project won the first prize in the Master Plan category on the Russian stage of Fiabci Prix D'exellence International Contest. Fiabci Prix D'Excellence is one of the world’s most prestigious real estate competitions run by FIABCI (the International Real Estate Federation) since 1992. The main idea behind the contest is to single out the best objects and to look into the new development trends on the real estate market. ‘Our victory was not sheer luck. Academic is both Russia and Eruope’s largest housing construction project, with its unique

‘Car dealers are now selling dubious cars alongside with the good ones; as a result, even the purchase of an automobile declared as new cannot guarantee the customers that they are buying a vehicle that really hasn’t been, say, involved in a crash. Now the law states that a seller must warn the customers about all the defects a car might have. Still, there are cases when a car is claimed to be brand new when it’s not, so the customer gets no warning whatsoever. So, in the end a newly bought ‘brand new car’ somehow won’t start,’ Vice President of All-Russian Consumer Protection League Andrei

The bank’s BOD decided on September 7, 2010 that eight of its subsidiaries would be converted into regular operational offices. The change will involve Rus-Bank’s representations in Kaliningrad, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Penza, Kazan, Astrakhan, Kurgan, and Kursk.

OAO MegaFon, a mobile operator, keeps expanding the range of services available through its video portal. The company now offers over thirty different channels to smartphone/Android users. People whose phones support Android can enjoy the specially created Video Portal to watch the channels without having to download the service mobile website; they can also administer their subscriptions, subscribe to and unsubscribe to channels, and create the Favorite Programs list. The software can be downloaded either through Android Market or via wap.megafonpro.ru in the Video Portal section. By