Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin decided to allocate 121 million RUR to complete the construction of some social infrastructure facilities. The spokesperson for the Governor reports 50 million RUR will be directed to an apartment block in the north-west of Chelyabinsk. The block’s hundred apartments are meant for the local actors and performers. The construction process is to be supervised by South Ural Housing Construction and Mortgage Agency. The new homes will have become available by July 2010. Then, two schools in the villages of Kusa and Zlokazovo will receive 25 million RUR

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin decided to allocate 121 million RUR to complete the construction of some social infrastructure facilities. The spokesperson for the Governor reports 50 million RUR will be directed to an apartment block in the north-west of Chelyabinsk. The block’s hundred apartments are meant for the local actors and performers. The construction process is to be supervised by South Ural Housing Construction and Mortgage Agency. The new homes will have become available by July 2010. Then, two schools in the villages of Kusa and Zlokazovo will receive 25 million RUR

TGK-9, the power supplier, no longer holds any share in Artemovskaya power station. Prior to this, the supplier used to have a 110% shareholding in Artemovskaya.

Uralskiy Val, the consumer electronics and white goods chain store, announced it might be able to pay off its debts in full despite the recently initiated bankruptcy proceedings. The company placed its insolvency application with Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court last summer. The chain had 193.29 million RUR worth of debts at the time and operated nineteen stores, of which eleven were located in Yekaterinburg and eight were based in Kurgan, Miass, Kachkanar, Pervouralsk, Zlatoust, Snezhinsk, Revda, and Kushva. The court accepted the application on July 20, 2009. In the course of the court’s

The dwellers of Sverdlovsk Region-based Altynai and Reftinskiy settlements plan to carry out a picket in the center of Yekaterinburg on September 25, 2009. The reason for the picketing is the enormous environmental degradation caused by Reftinskaya state district power plant’s performance. By taking this direct action, the villagers are hoping to attract Sverdlovsk Region Governor’s attention. ‘There are a lot of questions we’d like to ask the plant’s management. For one, after the locals had protested against the introduction of the dangerous dry ash handling system, the management organized

‘We still cannot understand why we have been getting such strange assessment of the enterprise and its managers’ activity from Sverdlovsk Region Government. We have to declare that a whole range of claims made at the administration’s latest anti-crisis committee meeting are simply not true,’ reports Uralvagonzavod Scientific and Production Enterprise. What happened at the meeting (chaired by Governor Eduard Rossel) was that the plant’s management’s actions were criticized bitterly by the government officials. For one, they disapproved of the prospective 6,000 layoffs, of the company’s only

‘Uralvagonzavod Scientific and Production Enterprise did receive the state order for some defense industry products, but it still hasn’t got any civil produce orders. Russian Railways Public Company, for instance, only placed the order for 6,000 gondola cars in 2009, even though the two companies’ original agreement for 2008-2010 provided for the delivery of 40,500 gondola cars. Then, the enterprise has some orders for cisterns, but these cannot be produced due to lack of a new coating production line. In fact, this line won’t even be commissioned this year. To make matters worse, no road

‘We are going to have our sales policy modified because of the recent market changes,’ Avtoland Holding Management Company’s Marketing and Advertising Director Svetlana Petrovikh said to an UrBC reporter. Avtoland Holding used to be Ford Motor Company’s only official dealer in Yekaterinburg, but the car manufacturer recently selected Okami and Avtosan as its local dealers as well. ‘Ford Motor Company keeps opening tenders for new dealers in Yekaterinburg every year, so two new dealers have been chosen this time. Avtoland feels this is a good thing. We believe in fair competition,’ Petrovikh

Alfa-Bank Group’s performance was a bit worse in the first half of 2009 than before. The group’s total assets, for instance, plunged by 15% (from $27.1bn down to $23bn). The group’s financial report, drawn up in accordance with the IAS, was published a few days ago. According to this report, the decrease in the asset value had to do with the ongoing economic recession that has been affecting the bank’s lending portfolio and the borrowers’ paying capacity. The group’s total lending portfolio had shrunk by 20.2% down to $15.3bn by June 30, 2009 against December 31, 2008.

‘The problems Ural Tire Plant has been experiencing are only getting worse. There are some reasons for this, too: Russian car factories are working less and making people redundant, so they need fewer tires now. The only way out is for the plant to follow suit, that is, to stop producing goods that don’t enjoy demand and to have some layoffs,’ SIBUR-Russian Tires Corporate Communications Department said to UrBC. ‘The company is, in fact, forced to make this decision. If we don’t launch stoppages and layoffs now, the short-term socio-economic consequences will be much more serious, SIBUR

‘X5 Retail Group’s Ural branch is planning to set up Carousel supermarket in KomsoMall Trade & Entertainment Center, but this will only happen in 2010 because of the problems the developer is having at the moment. In fact, DVI Holding started having a hard time as early as last spring, so in May 2009, they warned us about these difficulties,’ Director of X5 Retail Group’s Ural branch’s Alexei Krasnikov reports. In the meantime, the mall’s developer DVI Ural is now undergoing bankruptcy proceedings. ‘Despite the developer’s recent bankruptcy, X5 isn’t going to give up on its plans. After

West Siberian Iron & Steel Plant (Evras Holding member) will have to make 1,000 people redundant on October 1, 2009. This amounts to over 6% of the staff, most of whom will be people well into their retirement age. Evraz Holding intends to provide them with the redundancy package, however. This will include incidental allowances ranging from 90,000 RUR to 200,000 RUR per worker,’ Governor of Kemerov Region Aman Tuleev was recently quoted as saying by RBC Daily. Meanwhile, Evraz announced early in September 2009 that its enterprises went back to their full production capacity and needed

Bank Severnaya Kazna (the asset of Alfa-Bank) is going to introduce new service rates on October 6, 2009. The changes will affect services rendered to legal entities, sole traders, and self-employed private individuals. This news has been announced via the bank’s official website. For one, the bank will now charge a commission for the administration of accounts that have remained unused for a certain period of time. For instance, a commission of 5,500 RUR will be charged if a ruble settlement account that hasn’t been used for any transactions for a while. The commission charged for an unused

‘We have to sell 3.6 billion RUR worth of goods this year, which is, in fact, not a big figure for a company like Uralmashzavod. To keep the plant working, we actually need to sell twice as much. Next year, provided our sales departments prove more efficient, our sales will probably go up one and a half times or will even double,’ Uralmashzavod’s General Director Oleg Danchenko said in his interview to Za Tyazheloye Mashinostroyeniye. ‘The company produced 167 million RUR worth of goods and sold 240 million RUR worth of produce in July 2009. However, our main problem is the lack of orders and

Sverdlovsk Region’s public prosecution authorities for transportation examined Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport’s compliance with the municipal development legislation and with the runway safety regulation in August 2009. It was detected that the airport’s general contractor employed for the reconstruction of the runway strip had failed to provide the authorities with the papers necessary to prove their compliance with all the technical requirements. Therefore the runway could not be officially commissioned, the spokesperson for the prosecution authorities reports. Koltsovo Airport’s

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin received a thank-you cablegram from President of the Republic of Bashkortostan Murtaza Rakhimov. ‘The Bashkortostan delegation’s visit to Chelyabinsk Region on September 10, 2009 was a very important step for the development of the two regions’ partnership,’ the cablegram said. ‘I’m positive the implementation of our Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological, Social, and Cultural Cooperation Agreement will make the respective state authorities, organizations, and businesses’ interaction more efficient,’ Rakhimov observed. The Bashkortostan officials

Ford Motor Company announced the names of their new Yekaterinburg dealers. These are going to be Okami and Avtosan car centers. Prior to this, the only dealer the car manufacturer had in Yekaterinburg was Avtoland Holding. In fact, Ford Motor Company and Okami had signed a protocol of intent earlier. As for Avtosan, the two companies have been negotiating over a similar protocol lately. Ford Motor Company officially declared the start of the dealer tender in Yekaterinburg in August 2009. It was then rumored that Avtosan could become one of the company’s local dealers, but the show room was

Yuveliry Urala, the jewelry business, report their sales have nosedived recently, which led to a 30% drop in net profit. For one, the company’s net profit reached 4.9 million RUR in the first quarter of 2009 but only 3.42 million RUR in the second quarter of the year.

Ural Airlines has recently acquired one more Airbus А321 plane which is to become the company’s second A 321 aircraft now. In addition to these planes, the carrier is also operating ten A 320 aircraft as well as a number of domestically produced ones. The airline’s latest acquisition was earlier used by Kibris Turk Hava Yollari; this is a 198-seat airplane, with 16 business class seats and 182 economy class ones. The Airbus airplanes are being used on operating lease for the time being, but Ural Airlines will start getting brand new aircraft in just a few years. The airline and the plane

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin took part in the recent Greater Urals Interregional Association for Economic Cooperation’s meeting in Yekaterinburg. In his speech, the Governor gave his vision of how the Association could help overcome the recession as quickly as possible, reminding the listeners of its success in the early nineties when Russia was fighting another crisis. Sumin said the Ural regions needed an action plan aimed at a fast and painless economic recovery through the banking sector development and tax relief for businesses willing to invest in upgrades and energy-saving