A new office of Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank started operating in Yekaterinburg on December 7, 2006. This is the bank’s eleventh subsidiary in this city, based at 70 Lenin Ave. All the banking services for both businesses and individual clients are available at the new office that has all the advanced banking equipment needed to serve the clients quickly and efficiently. The bank’s experts are ready to give their clients professional advice in terms of all kinds of loans and deposits as well as to provide more information on the special offers for businesses. There are currently 18 offices of

‘Magnesite Industrial Complex has been working at almost full power lately; we’ve reached the point of our maximal potential, and it will therefore be difficult for the company to hit the 10% growth of production output (which has been the case for the last four years) in 2007. On the other hand, we’ve gone for the product diversification,’ the company’s General Director Igor Anikievitch said in the course of a meeting of local investors with acting Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Andrei Kosilov; the meeting was conducted within the framework of VI Ural Investment Forum. ‘The quality of our

‘The co-branding project turned out to be unprofitable because, as a lot of experts (for instance, the representatives of international payment systems) had warned, the target audience for this service was based in the regions,’ the analyst from BrokerCreditService Denis Mukhin said to UrBC representative relating to the decision of the Baltic Bank to stop servicing the co-branding Gold Crown MasterCard cards. ‘The international payment systems have tended to decrease their tariffs recently, so, in terms of the future, the share of the Russian payment systems will be gradually going down, and

The company produced 262,000 tons of coal in November 2006, including 67,100 tons of coal taken from Kapitalnaya mine and 30,000 tons taken from Komsomolskaya mine. The company’s workers performed 414,000 cubic meters worth of overburden operations and did 475 meters worth of development work, the company’s spokesperson said to UrBC representative.

The conflict of ROSNO and UralTransBank has still not been settled. ‘This is a situation of somewhat delicate nature, and it is difficult to define where the good and the bad guys are. I personally think that ROSNO’s accusing the bank of fraud is beyond the scope of business ethics. One has to be absolutely positive about a claim like this if one wants to avoid being sued for slander and having to publicly apologize afterwards,’ the Assets Management Director of Unicom Partner Investment and Finance Company Vitaliy Kalugin said to UrBC representative. ‘I believe this public dispute stems from

‘We used to do business with Hydrospetsstroy (the general contractor of Noviy Grad Construction Holding), yet we never got the money for the job in full,’ Sergey Suschiy, the Chief Engineer of Antalex Ltd., said to UrBC representative. ‘Our company acted as a subcontractor in a project coordinated by Hydrospetsstroy. We had to do a number of things that had not been included in the agreement, and Technadzor, the building authority, testified the completion of the jobs. However, we were not paid for working extra, with the missing sum coming to 20% of the total amount of money we were supposed

Uralvneshtorgbank summed up the results of its activity in the eleven months of 2006. The bank’s balance sheet total came to 33.14bn RUR on December 1, 2006, which exceeds the figures for January-November 2005 by 102%. Its profits and the authorized capital amounted to 1,094m RUR and 742m RUR, respectively; the bank’s equity basis rose by 166% and thus came to 2,904m RUR. The volume of investments on the deposits went up 90% compared with the eleven months of 2005 and reached the point of 16.2bn RUR, including 8.5bn RUR placed with the bank by private clients, reports the press officer for

‘We’ve had cases when an insurer whose license had been annulled kept issuing obligatory car insurance certificates,’ reports Vitaliy Yakushev of Law Office 35. ‘In instances of this sort, if the insured has a car accident, the court ends up having to make them pay for the repairs themselves, since the insurance company usually goes bankrupts and therefore cannot pay. The insurer’s assets normally have low liquidity, the insurance itself is something intangible, and, in most cases, the company transfers all the money from its accounts somewhere else,’ Mr Yakushev says. The Russian Union of

12 claims against MAKS Insurance Company have been laid with Yekaterinburg Consumer Rights Committee over eleven months of this year (this comes to approximately 23% of all claims against insurers), the spokesperson for the committee said to UrBC representative. In order to protect the rights of consumers, the committee experts had to sue the company for 180,285 RUR worth of damage (the claim was sustained, and the committee actually received 182,768 RUR). The committee received 54 complaints altogether in January-November 2006, with the main causes for complaining being the refusal of the

‘Our company has been using MegaFon Ural for three years. We are naturally interested in being able to always keep in touch with our workers, this is why we decided to use the services of this mobile operator,’ the Technical Director of Iota Ltd. Alexander Maltsev said to UrBC representative. ‘The quality of this services, the coverage area and the way the clients are cared for facilitate our own successful development, especially now that MegaFon Ural has been expanding its subsidiary network: this means all issues will be handled even faster,’ he said.

‘We have already been told not to buy from Panasonic any longer, as we stopped cooperating with this producer until it proves that it has returned to the honest market practices,’ Evgeniya Deeva, the PR Manager of EuroSet (the retail chain dealing in mobile phones and accessories) in Yekaterinburg reports on the recent refusal of large consumer electronics stores to deal with Panasonic. ‘This is not going to affect the goods we have already displayed for sale, however, since they have been tested,’ Ms Deeva says.

‘The need for the large federal banks to re-brand is often connected with them becoming retail-oriented. Businesses do pay attention to things like brands and logos, but only to a certain extent,’ the Head of Bank Ratings Department of Expert Rating Agency Pavel Samiev commented on the recent consolidation and re-branding trends in today’s banking. ‘A private client, however, wants the brand to be simple and clear; this is a must if you want to attract the mass audience,’ Mr Samiev observed. ‘Re-branding is good for a bank’s development, with most research findings showing that it stimulates

According to the Analytical Department of Ural Chamber of Real Estate, the existing office sales prices might soar by another 50% before the end of 2006. The expert from the Department say that the existing office sales market has experienced the highest-ever growth of price per square meter this year (the figure went up 52% over ten months). It is more stable, however, than the existing home sales market, where the prices went up almost 100%.

The regional House of Representatives adopted the budget of Sverdlovsk Region for 2007. According to the Minister of Finances Maria Serova, the profits amounted to almost 100bn RUR. Sverdlovsk Region budget is to get 63bn RUR in the form of the region’s own profits and 78bn RUR from the federal sources, with consolidated budget coming to 99bn RUR. 46% will be used to cover the social welfare expenditures, 12% will be invested in the region’s economy, and 29% will be used for inter-budgetary transfers.

‘Magnesite Industrial Complex is currently implementing a strategic program approved of by the shareholders and valid until 2010. This means we have a lot of things to do in terms of production management, introducing the newest equipment and the most advanced technologies,’ the company’s General Director Igor Anikievitch said in the course of a meeting of local investors with acting Governor of Chelyabinsk Region Andrei Kosilov; the meeting was conducted within the framework of VI Ural Investment Forum. ‘The total amount of investments for 2006-2010 is expected to reach the figure of 4.7bn

‘If ROSNO fails to comply with our requirements, this insurer is going to be sanctioned,’ Olga Tsarkova, Assistant to the Head of the Federal Insurance Surveillance Agency, said to UrBC representative. The disagreement between ROSNO and UralTransBank has still not been settled; both companies claim that the other party does not meet its agreement liabilities. This quarrel has already become known to the public as the Association of Regional Russian Banks and the Federal Insurance Surveillance Agency got involved in the conflict; the latter considered the claim of UralTransBank and gave some

The top executives of Russia’s leading retail chains dealing in home appliances and consumer electronics came up with a statement that depicts the way Panasonic does business in Russia as unscrupulous. They said they were going to stop selling goods produced by the company. The writing of this statement was caused by ‘the dishonest and sometimes illegal practices employed by Panasonic in Russia’; it was signed by Chairman of EuroSet Evgeniy Chichvarkin, President of Svyaznoy Maxim Nogotkov, President of Eldorado Igor Yakovlev, Vice President of M.Video Alexander Zaionts, President of

Olips retired 40.6m RUR worth of bills and partly covered its second bill tranche with the total face value of 88.7m RUR. The first tranche worth 62.7m RUR was paid at the end of September. The company still has 71m RUR worth of second- and third-tranche bills in circulation. It broke into the market in order to project the image of an open and transparent company as well as to build a balanced borrowing structure and create a publicly known credit record to facilitate the forthcoming corporate bonds market entry.

According to the Central Bank of Russia, the volume of loans given by UralTransBank to sole traders despite an overdraft account went down by 44.7% (from 33.994m RUR to 18.772m RUR) in January-November 2006.

‘If the temperature in the schools and kindergartens of Polevskoy drops below 16 degrees centigrade above zero, they will have to be closed. The temperature in the buildings meant for children must comply with the norms. Given that there are 18 schools and 21 kindergartens in the town at the moment, almost 10,000 children will not be able to attend classes or go to day care,’ says Olga Schwartzman, Deputy Head of Education Board of Polevskoy. In the meantime, the town is actually likely to have no heating this winter.