‘We feel the state might create and stimulate the demand for certain sectors’ produce or for certain projects through a balanced and efficient policy. This is why, in our opinion, the government should focus on the building industry for the time being, which we see as the efforts aimed at developing the infrastructural sector,’ said Delovaya Rossiya Chairman Boris Titov at a Stolypin Club meeting. ‘Some large-scale projects might look as both appealing and well-calculated long-term investments. Some of them are only appealing, like the bridge to Russkiy Island, for instance, since the

A number of UC RUSAL’s Sverdlovsk Region-based Ural smelter will probably get transferred to Khakasia, even though the original idea consisted in moving them to the company’s smelter located in Krasnoyarsk. ‘It’s true that we did plan to have our people transferred to Krasnoyarsk, but the smelter there is also experiencing some problems at the moment, and some people are being made redundant. We’ve reached an agreement with our branch in Sayanogorsk, Khakasia, where a new plant is to open in the spring. A portion of Ural smelter’s employees might end up working there in May,’ the enterprise’s

URSA Bank had bought out over $274m worth of its Eurobonds by March 1, 2009. The company started out with the process at the end of 2008, announcing that the bank was prepared to buy the bonds from four of its issues on both the pubic market and through private transactions. The first $351m-bond issue is to be retired in May 2009, the second one, with face value of 4.5 billion Hungarian forints, is to be retired in September 2009, the ?400m is to be retired in May 2010, and the last ?300m one is to be retired in November 2011. ‘We are buying out our own bonds despite the market’s current

‘The State Retirement Fund undergoes various inspections on a regular basis, including those carried out by the prosecution authorities. The fund makes the pension payments either through a bank or by post, depending on each particular retiree’s preferences. All of the fund’s intermediaries are for-profit organizations. So, first, the money was transferred to the Russian Post; then, the post placed the money with Bank VEFK-Ural,’ the Russian Federation Retirement Fund’s Sverdlovsk Region division CEO Sergey Dubinkin said in the course of a recent press conference in Yekaterinburg. In the

The state-run Vnesheconombank is to offer Koltsovo Airport of Yekaterinburg a 2.25-billion-ruble loan to help the airport complete the international airways terminal and the railway platform as well as to pay off the short-term debts. The bank was officially reported to have allocated 1.4 billion RUR for loan payments, while the total sum of the transaction comes to over 5.17 billion RUR (this covers the credit line’s volume, the interest for using the loan, and the loan commission).

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) put the development of its oxygen facilities on the company’s priority projects list. According to the enterprise’s PR Department, their oxygen shop’s primary consumers (the blast furnace shop, the steel-smelting shop, and the oxygen converter shop) were forced to cut down dramatically on their outputs at the end of last year. The company was then capable of producing 45,000 cubic meters of oxygen an hour, whereas the equipment’s estimated capacity came to as many as 270,000-280,000 cubic meters an hour. Only four out of ten machines were in actual

Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, placed Russian landline operator Uralsvyazinform’s long-term credit rating (namely, BB-) on the CreditWatch list, with Negative Rating Outlook. ‘This has reflected our concerns over the way the company’s liquid assets are managed; we actually feel that it’s a bit too harsh,’ says Standard & Poor’s analyst Alexander Gryaznov. ‘We believe the operator is going to retire its three-billion-ruble bond issue on time at the end of March using the remainder of the available money and short-term credit lines. However, we did expect the company to refinance

Bank Monetniy Dom has recently come up with a special offer for its customers, popularly dubbed ‘Plus 1% Interest Guarantee. Under the terms of the offer, every customer who opens an Interest Guarantee deposit type at the bank on March 4-10, 2009 will be offered a one percent increase in the annual interest rate offered on this deposit type. ‘Our Interest Guarantee scheme provides for the so-called gradual interest rate that depends on the amount of time the money has been in the bank’s account. There is no topping up option, whereas the interest gets capitalized every thirty or sixty-one

Sredneuralsk Metallurgical Plant owes over 58 million RUR to one of the local banks, which is why the latter laid a claim against the company, demanding that care should be taken for the bank to get its money back. Sverdlovsk Region Court of Arbitration ruled that the plant’s machinery should be arrested. Therefore the local division of the Officers of Justice Service had 9,557,014 RUR worth of the plant’s property registered and arrested on February 24, 2009. This was done in compliance with the court’s order and on the basis of the Federal Laws 229 and 118 regarding the enforcement

‘We still haven’t been given the loan needed to put up The Ukraine Hotel on Yekaterinburg-Koltsovo Road. All the papers have been filled in and submitted, but the authorities keep finding some new faults with us. Moreover, we’ve already paid a 2.5 million-ruble commission on the loan we never got. So far, we’ve managed to find 64 million RUR, but we still need the loan resources,’ Uralzarubezhservis GD Petr Shcherbina announced at Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Eduard Rossel’s conference on construction issues. ‘We cannot have the water supply infrastructure installed because they insist on

Bankir.ru’s experts looked into the Russian banking sector’s last year’s successes and failures, with the emphasis laid on the investments made by private individuals. Their research has shown that the volume of private customers’ deposits increased by 16.9% in 2008, which was actually only a half of what the experts had predicted earlier. Then, the deposit volume growth only came to .1% in September through December 2008. Nevertheless, some of the provincial banks managed to keep their performance up in spite of the dropping demand for the deposit products; besides, these banks were actually

Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Petr Sumin commented upon the results of the recent municipal-level elections in the region. The spokesperson for the Governor reports Petr Sumin basically approved of the election campaign’s results, saying that now the elections have been through with, the mayors and the deputies have to get down to work and prove as good as their word. He also praised the region’s and town-scale election committees’ work and said the voters deserved a special thanks for turning up in such great numbers this year.

This January, Bank Severnaya Kazna’s net asset volume has gone down by 527.794 million RUR (from 35,997,129,000 RUR on January 1, 2009 to 35,469,335,000 on February 1, 2009). These data are available from the synoptic table displaying Sverdlovsk Region-based banks’ performance indicators (placed on Bank24.ru’s official website).

URSA Bank made 228,125 million RUR worth of coupon payments on its ISIN XS 0288664617ruble Eurobonds on February 26, 2009. The coupon yield was determined at 9,125% a year. The bank went through with the five-billion-ruble LPN issue on February 26, 2007; the papers were to be in circulation for three years. The issue was carried out by Ireland-based URSA Finance PLC and coordinated by Citigroup и Standard Bank.

VUZ-Bank’s losses came to 45.134 million RUR in January 2009. These data are available from the synoptic table displaying Sverdlovsk Region-based banks’ performance indicators (placed on Bank24.ru’s official website).

According to the synoptic table displaying Sverdlovsk Region-based banks’ performance indicators (available via Bank24.ru’s official website), Bank24.ru’s losses had reached 64.027 million RUR by February 1, 2009.

Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) spent over 1 billion RUR on social welfare programs in 2008. The company’s PR Department reports they increased their spending on aiding the war veterans through Metallurg charity fund and on other charity projects. For one, the number of employees who had a chance to go to the corporate health centers last year was 8% greater compared to the year 2007. Then, some 10,000 people were offered paid trips to MMK’s ski resorts, which exceeded the figures for the previous year by 40%. Finally, the enterprise kept on supporting the new mothers and their

Yekaterinburg’s Kirovskiy court keeps looking into the claims laid by Bank Severnaya Kazna’s (now the asset of Alfa-Bank) former employees, who disagree with the company’s decision to refuse them their redundancy payments, their paid vacations, and the salaries that were due a long time ago. These former employees are the bank’s First Deputy BOD Chairman Leonid Bratsev, Deputy Chairman Sergey Kuroptev, and the Chairman’s Advisors Valeriy Malkov, and Evgeniy Parfenov. According to Kommersant, the plaintiffs and the bank have signed some additional agreements earlier that provided for a pay

First Deputy Head of Sverdlovsk Region Government and Minister for Economics and Labor Mikhail Maximov chaired a meeting of the committee responsible for supporting entrepreneurial stability in the region. The meeting participants looked into the economic state of events at seven local companies and heard reports from the representatives of Uralasbest, Ural Optical & Mechanical Plant, Uralmashzavod, Pervouralsk-based Dinur, Sverdlovsk Railway O&M Plant, Rezh Mechanical Plant, and Natalyinskiy Glass Works. All those present noted that Uralmashzavod kept going through some grave

The volume of private individuals’ deposits in UralTransBank has gone down by 10% since September 2008. These data are available from Bankir.ru’s report on the performance of Top 200 banks with the greatest volumes of private individuals’ deposits.