MDM Bank’s subsidiaries based in Ural and Siberian Federal Districts have recently started refinancing consumer loans issued by other banks. Borrowers with no overdue loan payments can be given a loan of up to 100,000 RUR for a period of one to seven years. ‘MDM Bank is now ready to help responsible loan recipients (and customers of other banks) decrease their monthly loan payments. This means we are willing to offer them loans that they can use to pay off their debt in the other bank. Depending on the loan payment period, our customers can reduce their monthly fee considerably,’ says MDM

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin allocated 156 million RUR from the region’s budget, to be invested in Chelyabinsk’s education system. According to the spokesperson for the Governor, the money is one of the many portions provided by the budget for local education programs this year. All in all, the city will be given 2.225 million RUR in 2009, of which 1.6 million will be spent on teachers’ salaries. Chelyabinsk’s 145 schools employ about 5,500 teachers, while the entire region’s 938 schools employ over 27,500 teachers. All these people’s salaries are fully and timely covered by the

Chairman of the Russian Federation State Duma and Head of United Russia’s Supreme Council Boris Gryzlov feels the government should support The Industrial Urals – The Polar Urals (an ambitious large-scale project on the industrial development of the Urals’ north) by providing some subsidies from the Investment Fund, Prime TASS reports. ‘United Russia has been involved in this project for two years now. I believe the documentation will have been fully confirmed by the end of the year; however, the state budget does not cover the financing for the project in 2010-2012,’ Gryzlov said to Head of

The region’s Deputy Prosecutor wants the court to cancel the agreement regarding the rent of land allotment (cadastral No. 66:41:07 02 064:0078) with the area of 2,800 sq m located in Sovetskaya St. in Yekaterinburg. According to the land use map, the allotment is actually situated in the middle of Zheleznodorozhnikov St.-Pionerov St.-Uralskaya St. - Sovetskaya St. quarter. The plaintiff requires that this land allotment be yielded back to Yekaterinburg municipal council.

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court will resume hearing of the claim laid by Bank VTB against Pnevmostroymashina on October 20, 2009. The plaintiff wants to be paid 51.88 million RUR and to have the defendant’s mortgaged property arrested. The sum of the claim is made up of 50 million RUR worth of debt proper (resulting from the loan agreement signed on December 24, 2007), a certain amount of loan interest, and the commission charged for cash transactions. As for the mortgaged property in question, these are the assets of PSM-Gidravlika used as collateral for the loan agreement. The bank has

Sverdlovsk Region environmental prosecution authorities detected numerous violations of the existing laws at Uralkhimmash, their spokesperson reports. For one, the enterprise whose production process involves sixty-one different kinds of by-products and waste has no certificates listing the hazard class of these wastes and carries no passports or documentation for sixteen kinds of hazardous pollutants. What is more, the workers handling this hazardous waste have not received any professional, documented training. Then, Uralkhimmash is supposed to maintain a 100-meter protective zone in

SKB-Bank came up with a performance report for January-September 2009; most of the company’s development indicators showed some positive dynamics. For one, the bank’s asset volume increased by over 2.8 billion RUR in September 2009 and thus exceeded 46.8 billion RUR. Then, SKB-Bank attracted 2.5 billion RUR worth of various investments, mostly in the form of private individuals’ deposits; the total volume of attracted investment thus reached 39.8 billion RUR. Finally, the bank’s own funds came to more than 8.232 billion RUR on October 1, 2009, a figure which allows SKB-Bank to remain

The Central Bank of Russia reports the volume of private for-profit organizations’ deposits (those valid for 31 to 90 days) at KAB Bank Société Générale Vostok went down by 11.09% in August 2009, that is, from 14,138,288,000 RUR to 12,569,836,000 RUR.

‘It would actually be a good idea to put up a similar depot in the north of Sverdlovsk Region (say, in Verkhoturye), since traffic will start moving in from Khanty-Mansiyskiy Autonomous Region as soon as this winter,’ Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel said at the opening ceremony of LUKOIL’s new bulk plant in Yekaterinburg. ‘Then, the filling station at Koltsovo Airport of Yekaterinburg needs to be fully upgraded, especially as the airport is trying to develop despite the current economic hardships,’ the Governor added. The Governor first spoke about his plan to solve the problem of

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court is going to look into the claim laid by Rosoboronexport Federal State Unitary Enterprise against Ural Civil Aviation Plant on October 19, 2009. The plaintiff insists on being paid 2.28 million RUR. According to the case files, Rosoboronexport wants to get 1,398,881 RUR in terms of the debt itself and 881,291 RUR in terms of interest charged in accordance with Article 395 of the Russian Federation Civil Code. The claim thus totals to 2,280,172 RUR. The plaintiff maintains Ural Civil Aviation Plant failed to pay them the obligatory five-percent commission on

Ural Airlines has recently offered a promotional price for Yekaterinburg-Beijing-Yekaterinburg flights; the tickets are now available for only ?300 (all fees and charges included). The flight is operated two times a week on a modern and comfortable A 320 aircraft. The flight timetable is as follows: The plane takes off in Yekaterinburg at 8:20 PM on Wednesdays and Sundays and arrives in Beijing at 4 AM on Thursdays and Mondays. The return plane leaves Beijing at 5:15 AM on Thursdays and Mondays and lands in Yekaterinburg at 9:25 AM. ‘The agreements existing between Ural Airlines and some

Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court refused to let UniCreditBank claim the money owed to it by STKS-Nedvizhimost. The court actually declared on August 10, 2009 that STKS-Nedvizhimost should undergo bankruptcy proceedings. On September 3, 2009 the company asked the court to reconsider their case since some new factors were at play. On October 2, 2009, their claim was sustained and the call for bankruptcy proceedings cancelled. Now UniCreditBank did not ask to be put on the list of STKS-Nedvizhimost’s creditors while the court was reconsidering the latter’s case. The bank only placed its

‘M.Video’s retail sales output amounted to 57.552 billion RUR (VAT included) in January-September 2009, which was 5% better than in January-September 2008. In the meantime, the sales of many other consumer electronics chain stores dropped by 11%,’ the spokesperson for M.Video Company reports. ‘As for the third quarter of 2009, our retail sales declined by 7% in comparison with a year earlier, while the other stores’ sales volumes decreased by 20% against the second quarter of 2009 due to the current recession,’ the spokesperson notes.

Barclays Bank (a member of Barclays Group) opened a representation in Yekaterinburg. According to Barclays Bank Chairman and Commercial Director Evgeniy Retyunskiy, their new representation will only employ two people for the time being, and they will only deal in offering loans to large and medium enterprises. At the same time, the bank is willing to help big businesses to get their debts to other banks restructured. Retyunskiy admitted, however, that the bank did not have a unique selling proposition at the moment and was planning to carry on implementing the standard banking market

‘Sverdlovsk Region Federation of Trade Unions has been keeping an eye on Uralvagonzavod. So far, nobody has got an answer to the question of what is going to happen to this defense industry giant’s workers on January 1, 2010,’ the Federation representative says. ‘To make sure people have got jobs, the state (our company’s primary proprietor) must ensure enough orders for the railway machinery. In case the state cannot afford to use the plant’s full capacity, Uralvagonzavod’s trade union just cannot agree to large-scale redundancies unless there appears an employment scheme designed by the

The net profit of MDM-Bank reached 1,383,000,000 RUR in September 2009 against 232 million RUR in August 2009, the bank’s press officer reports. The profit was calculated in accordance with the Russian accounting standards. The bank’s own funds have reached 59.9 billion RUR by October 1, 2009, while its capital adequacy coefficient came to 16.6%, which was .93% better than a month earlier.

‘The problem related to the proposed introduction of dry ash handling at Reftinskaya power plant has not become any clearer by now. We have suggested cooperating and sharing our data with the plant’s management, but they said they were not at liberty to accept any offers of this sort and said that we should try appealing to the Board of Directors of Enel OGK-5, the plant’s owner. In the meantime, not a single Reftinskaya power plant executive made any effort to help our application reach this Board,’ Chairman of the International Socio-Environmental Union’s Sverdlovsk Region division Vladimir

The Economic News Agency has been asked by Nezavisimaya Gazeta to do a regular research on how efficient the performance of private and public sectors and government deputies is in terms of lobbying projects favorable for certain interest groups. The lobbying in question is the so-called civilized one that does not imply any bribe offers. The latest update on the research was done in September 2009 using the usual method: a few scores of experts had to rank the lobbying efficiency of about 240 candidates using a five-point scale. Among the candidates were entrepreneurs, politicians, and

The number customers of who enjoy using SKB-Bank’s online service popularly known as Couch Bank has exceeded 6,000 people by October 14, 2009, the bank reports. The Couch Bank customers can use the service to transfer rubles into the other banks’ accounts as well as into SKB-Bank’s accounts (this includes both one customer’s various accounts and the accounts of several different customers). They can also get account statements and detailed updates on all the account transactions and are informed about the bank’s deposit and loan offers. ‘It’s very convenient to subscribe to the Couch Bank

Koltso Urala Commercial Bank issued its 100,000th bank card recently. This ‘record-breaking’ card was made for one of Uralelectromed’s workers in Verkhnyaya Pyshma. The employee will now use it to receive the monthly salary payments, the bank’s press officer reports. ‘We did not plan for this card to be issued specifically in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, but it’s certainly nice that the special card was issued in Yekaterinburg’s satellite town. In fact, the salary-paying scheme Uralelectromed and Koltso Urala are working on is one of the bank’s largest card-issuing projects,’ the press officer