Uralkhimmash BOD decided to terminate the authority of the company’s Director-General Vladimir Kulakov before the end of his term, so his contract was annulled. Sergey Tsarapkin was elected the enterprise’s Director-General for one year. Tsarapkin was also allowed to retain his current positions in the management of the company’s affiliated enterprises.

Senior Vice President of Russian Railways Valentin Gapanovitch had the technical specifications for the new SinaraHybrid coordinated. The new shunting locomotive with TEM9H hybrid power equipment will be developed by the engineering company STM Innovational Development Center (part of Sinara Transport Machines). This is going to be an eight-wheel locomotive with electric alternating current transition and a direct wheel drive with the total capacity of 1,200 hp. The locomotive will be fitted with lithium-ion energy storage units and ultracondensers. The hybrid loco will also be more

OOO Sun Fruit applied to Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court, asking to declare Tonus soft drinks plant bankrupt, the court’s press officer reports. The plaintiff says the defendant owes the company 1.46m RUR, $14,680, and ?18,640 and insists that the debtor, Tonus soft drinks plant (tax payer number 6662001230) be declared insolvent. As the plaintiff failed to provide the court with all the documents needed to take legal action, the case is for now left to rest.

The retail lending portfolio of BNP Paribas Vostok that is closing down its classic retail services in Russia was sold to Bank Uralsib. The company made the best bid in the course of the tender. Paying a bit more for the asset made certain sense: Uralsib is currently falling behind its competitors in terms of retail segment growth, so now it will be able to both build up on its lending portfolio and improve its deposit base thanks to the French banks’ customers,’ Kommersant reports. According to a report produced by BNP Paribas Vostok, the company’s lending portfolio amounted to 1.3bn RUR on

The court of Milan had the assets of Italy’s leading bank UniCredit worth ?245m arrested; this was done within the framework of an investigation that aims to see if the bank avoided paying taxes in 2007-2008. The Italian police suspect that the fraudulent scheme was suggested to UniCredit by the British Barclays, RBC daily reports. Judge Luigi Varanelli told The Wall Street Journal that the assets arrested equal to the profits made by the bank in 2007-2008 and not paid to the state budget. The police believe that UniCredit had its tax declarations deliberately altered for the purposes of tax

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service declared the advertisement run by IKEA via Domashniy, Rossiya, Pyatyi TV channels in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kasan, Nizhniy Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Omsk, and Kemerovo in January 2011 to be in contradiction with Article 5 (part 4, paragraph 1) of the Federal Advertising Act. The advertiser IKEA DOM was ordered to stop the offense. All the files relating to the case were placed with the Service’s executive so that an administrative suit could be instituted and a fine imposed on the offender.

Cyprus-based Monsource Limited now controls 95.38% of UralElectroSetStroy’s shares, the issuer’s report states.

Sky Express is not going to operate any flights from Yekaterinburg to Moscow and back on October 18-22, 2011; the airline is already giving the money back to customers. The air carrier’s Yekaterinburg representation was unable to provide UrBC with any comments as to the reasons for the decision taken by the company. The airline’s Moscow office explained that the flights would most likely not be operated until November 29, 2011; they would be resumed in the future, but fewer flights would be offered than before.

The Russian power suppliers keep commenting on the Russian Government’s decision to halt the growth of heating and electricity rates. The decision not to let the rates grow will affect the implementation of our investment program. We cannot produce any precise figures before the decisions as to the rates have been finalized. One could suppose that the scale of next year’s investment will be approximately the same as this year’s figures, rather than the increased ones initially planned by the company. We will have to cut back considerably on reconstructing the currently used facilities, but we

Standard & Poor's placed the Russian cosmetics manufacturer Concern Kalina’s ruA+ national scale credit rating on CreditWatch, with Positive rating outlook. The company’s rating is badly affected by the great competition on the Russian cosmetics and personal hygiene items market as well as by the relatively poor geographical diversity and its small business volume (small compared with its foreign rivals). We feel the additional risks arise from the company’s insufficient liquidity indicators, its susceptibility to currency risks, low financial flexibility, and poor free CFO

The Forbes magazine carried an article on a foreign exchange trader Alexei Kalinichenko, who is now kept in a detention ward in Yekaterinburg. According to the inquiry committee, the man set up a pyramid scheme and took advantage of over 4,000 people residing in various parts of Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Latvia, doing them a total of over 1bn RUR worth of damage. The article, entitled ‘Ural Pyramid: A Story of the Millennium’s Greatest Fraud’, mentions the viewpoint of the suspect himself, who claims he became a victim of his business partners in Russia. Alexei

The 17th Arbitration & Appeals Court rejected the claim of KESKO-Ural; the plaintiff actually contested the ruling pronounced by Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court earlier. In July 2011, Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court refused to meet the claims of KESKO-Ural (the Novotel Hotel) laid against Zoom Zoom Photographers; the plaintiff insisted on being paid 223,000 RUR by the defendant. At the start, KESKO-Ural refused to pay Zoom Zoom Photographers their fee for taking a photo shoot of the Yekaterinburg-based Novotel Hotel’s interior. The photography business took the case to an

Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Alexander Misharin supported the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ application for the establishment of the Israeli Consulate-General in Yekaterinburg. In his letter to the Foreign Affairs Minister the Governor stressed that this step would promote Russia and Israel’s economic and cultural cooperation. The Consulate-General is expected to be based in Yekaterinburg and to service Kurgan Region, Sverdlovsk Region, Tyumen Region, Chelyabinsk Region, Khanty-Mansiysky Autonomous Region, and Yamalo-Nenetsky Autonomous District. The corresponding agreement will come

The general contractor involved in the construction of Yekaterinburg-EXPO exhibition center, Rusgrad is to take its case to Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court, demanding that its customer Ural Exhibition Center be forbidden to acquire any ownership rights over the center in question. Another claim has to do with the money the customer still hasn’t paid the contractor for the job done, Rusgrad’s Director-General Stanislav Dresvyankin told the reporters in the course of a meeting with the customer’s representatives and the contractor companies. Rusgrad reports the company cannot get the money

Russia’s Federal Financial Markets Service is going to ask the stock exchanges about data on the transactions involving Concern Kalina’s ordinary shares. The transactions the agency is interested in are those conducted just before the concern’s deal with Unilever was announced, a representative told Interfax. Now the news of Unilever buying the Yekaterinburg-based company was made public on October 14, 2011. The decision to investigate the possible use of some insider data regarding this Unilever/Concern Kalina deal will have to be made after a thorough examination of the data provided by the

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service declared the actions of Uniastrum Bank related to the administration of bank-managed mutual funds to be an act of unfair competition, the FAS’s press service reports. The agency detected that the bank delivered inaccurate information as to investment strategies and the ways of using them via its website and advertising materials; its investment policy statement regarding Premier bank-managed mutual funds was also misleading for both potential investors and the bank-managed mutual funds’ founders. These actions actually violate Article 14 (part 1,

Chelyabinsk Region-based enterprise Karabashmed had its shaft furnace dismantled recently. The furnaces that were in operation at one of Russia’s oldest metallurgical enterprises for over a hundred years were shut down as early as 2007, after Russian Copper Company took over the business. The large-scale renovation involved eliminating the most environmentally obsolete machinery out of the production process, which reduced the amount of harmful emissions by six times. The dismantling of the furnaces that were shut down earlier is quite symbolic, for these are the furnaces that caused the

Ural Airlines stopped using TU-154M airplanes. The last flight was operated by a plane of this type from Yamburg to Koltsovo Airport of Yekaterinburg on Sunday, October 16, 2011, the airline’s press service reports. The company’s Director-General Sergey Skuratov said in the course of a briefing that the company stopped using TU-154M planes for economic reasons. These are the safest Russian planes, but, unfortunately, they are uneconomic. Thanks to TU-154M. we managed well during perestroika, since we could afford to operate flights abroad. These planes served as an intermediate stage of sorts

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service is going to conduct a scheduled on-site inspection of the German industrial concern Siemens’s Russian division through November 3, 2011, the FAS’s press service reports. The inspection is aimed at an all-round analysis of the company’s activity. The FAS has asked consumers to provide information on Siemens’s Russian branch violating the antimonopoly agreement by refusing to sign agreements, coordinating its distributors’ actions involving the resale of their produce, colluding with other organizations or authorities, which limits competition, setting the

A number of international experts are planning to discuss the Russian cities’ preparations for the World Cup 2018 in Yekaterinburg. The capital of the Urals will be the first city to host some Russian and foreign experts in the field of infrastructure development and sports facilities logistics on October 27-28, 2011. The experts were invited by Russia’s Transport Ministry and the Olympic Games Transportation Committee. Among the experts expected to arrive in Yekaterinburg are a professor from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, who will give a speech on the way