Jones Lang LaSalle came up with a report on the state of the Russian commercial estate market in the first quarter of 2010. The company says that, after a quick rise at the end of last year, the demand for the shopping areas in the Russian malls has remained the same. Moscow’s shopping malls are still more popular than the provincial ones, so the retail trade turnover went up by 2.7% in the Russian capital and only by 0.8% in the rest of Russia in January-March 2010 (compared with January-March 2009). ‘Even though retailers have been showing more interest in renting lately, the share of

The trade union of UC RUSAL’s Severouralsk bauxite mine (SUBR) is to carry out a protest picket in front of the municipal prosecution authorities’ office on April 30, 2010. The protesters’ main demand is that the prosecutor Dmitriy Famutdinov leave office after he failed to respond to the violation of workers’ rights, the Independent Trade Union of Russian Miners reports. The protesters are planning to hold banners with slogans like, ‘RUSAL! Do respect workers’ rights and interests!’, ‘Let’s protect trade union activists! United Russia! Do vote FOR changes in Labor Code’s Article 374!’,

MTS, one of Russia’s Big Three mobile operators, is going to lay off workers in its Ural branch. UrBC found out that about forty local employees have already received letters notifying them of the redundancies. MTS announced early in March 2010 that the Ural branch’s call center would be relocated from Yekaterinburg to Samara in order to reduce the company’s outgoings. The workers were informed about the changes two months before these changes came into full effect. MTS’s Ural branch currently employs about 600 people.

On May 15, 2010, the StartupPoint forum will be held in Yekaterinburg for the first time in order to provide a communication platform for the local investors and startup companies. The event is supported by SKB Kontur (the federal IT company), AKSIT Association, and IT-eburg website. The forum is to take place in the Moskovskaya Gorka Hotel at 131 Moskovskaya St at 2:00 PM. StartupPoint is open to all the startups willing to interest the potential investors in their projects, and it’s absolutely free. The only thing a company has to do is apply for the forum in advance and be willing to

The annual general meeting of LSR Group’s OAO Betfor concrete goods plant’s shareholders resulted in the decision not to pay the dividend for the year 2009 on the plant’s type A ordinary registered shares or preference registered shares. In addition, the stockholders decided that the BOD members were not getting any end-of-year bonuses.

The Kinofox cinema’s equipment was confiscated after the company had demonstrated Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, and The Book of Eli motion pictures to its audience without paying anything to the soundtrack composers, the spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Region’s public prosecution authorities reports. OOO Kinofox is based in Kamensk-Uralskiy, Sverdlovsk Region. It was revealed that the movie theater had not been paying to the composers of music for Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, Alvin & The Chipmunks-2, Black Lightning and The Book of Eli since December 2009. The films were demonstrated to the viewers on

According to the findings of a research carried out by Rospotrebnadzor, the federal consumer rights watchdog, forty-two people developed chronic work-related illnesses in Yekaterinburg last year, which means every 0.7 people in 10,000 became ill. This number was 1.4 times greater than that for the year 2008, the spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Region’s division of Rospotrebnadzor reports. As far as Yekaterinburg goes, these are the machine-building and the construction industries that pose the greatest health hazards to the workers. The number of employees with work-related illnesses was the

OAO The Industrial Urals-The Polar Urals Corporation called off the opening of its Yekaterinburg office that had been announced earlier. The corporation has recently relocated its HQ from Moscow to Yekaterinburg’s Atrium Palace Hotel. Apart from this, the company also cancelled the press conference for Chairman of the corporation’s Supervisory Board Alexander Beletskiy. The press conference was supposed to have taken place on April 26, 2010.

Yekaterinburg Customs instituted legal proceedings against a local trading company that deals in the import of toys. The administrative lawsuit’s charges are based on Article 14.10 of the Russian Federation (copyright infringement). The customs officers from the intellectual property rights protection department inspected the goods and declared that 2,160 children’s mobile phones bearing Disney Princess trademark (the trademark owner being the U.S.-based Disney) were actually counterfeits. Upon this finding, the customs officials contacted the trademark owner’s official representative in

Yekaterinburg radio equipment plant’s Board of Directors suggested that the shareholders do not declare any dividends for 2009, the company reports. The annual general meeting is to take place in Yekaterinburg on June 26, 2010.

Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK) came up with a performance report for 2009. The state of the company’s financial affairs looks a bit bleak: despite EBITDA growing by 84% in the second half of 2009 against the first half, this performance indicator was still below expected and below the market consensus, Bank of Moscow’s Analytical Department reports. ‘The main reason why TMK’s actual results are so different from our forecasts is that the company’s North American division finished the year off with $5m worth of EBITDA losses (in fact, at the end of the first half of 2009 the loss figures

A verdict of guilty was recently returned upon a Yekaterinburg-based pirated videos trader; the public prosecutor, who insisted upon the sentence, explained the offender had done large-scale damage to the copyright holders, the district division of the Russian Federation General Prosecutor’s Office reports. In the course of the court sessions, the prosecution provided exhaustive evidence of how the thirty-one-year-old Alexander Okunev had been selling pirated audio and video discs in a store in Griboyedov St. in Yekaterinburg since the fall of 2007. He used to buy the fake goods by wholesale

Despite the recent claims as to the restored air connection in Europe, two flights were called off in Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport on April 23, 2010. These were Yekaterinburg-Helsinki and Yekaterinburg-Frankfurt flights, the airport’s online announcement board states. All in all, eight flights were cancelled in Koltsovo in one week due to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano located within 200 km of Reykjavik, Iceland.

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs declared the results of its Best Russian Enterprises contest for 2009. The winners and the nominees received their awards during the Russian Business Week (which is the Union’s key event in the field of state-private cooperation). OAO Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) won the competition in the Best Innovational Project category, the company’s PR Department reports. Last year, MMK completed a major investment project on putting up a hi-tech plate iron production facility on its premises. This plate iron is popular with the O&G

On April 8, 2010, the interest rate for Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) BO-05 bonds was determined in the course of a tender. The bonds total to 8 billion RUR and are to be in circulation for 1,092 days (three years). Under the conditions of the bond issue, no en-route offers are provided; the coupon period comes to 182 days. The potential investors placed over 14.5 billion RUR worth of bids for the tender, which meant the issue was oversubscribed by 1.8 times. According to the results of the tender, the interest rate for the first coupon of MMK’s bonds was set at 7.65% a year,

A continuous hot galvanizing unit produced by the Italian Danieli & C. Officine Meccaniche SpA was launched at MMK- Atakaş in Iskenderun, Turkey recently. The new unit’s estimated capacity comes to 450,000 tons of zinc-coated rolled products a year. These goods are to be both sold and used at some further manufacturing stages on a polymeric coating unit. Now this unit, launched on January 15, 2010, has a capacity of 200,000 tons of goods a year. According to MMK’s PR Department, their MMK-Atakaş project is being implemented in accordance with the schedule. At the final stage, MMK-Atakaş’s

A verdict of guilty was recently returned upon a Yekaterinburg-based pirated videos trader; the public prosecutor, who insisted upon the sentence, explained the offender had done large-scale damage to the copyright holders, the district division of the Russian Federation General Prosecutor’s Office reports. In the course of the court sessions, the prosecution provided exhaustive evidence of how the thirty-one-year-old Alexander Okunev had been selling pirated audio and video discs in a store in Griboyedov St. in Yekaterinburg since the fall of 2007. He used to buy the fake goods by wholesale

Despite the recent claims as to the restored air connection in Europe, two flights were called off in Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport on April 23, 2010. These were Yekaterinburg-Helsinki and Yekaterinburg-Frankfurt flights, the airport’s online announcement board states. All in all, eight flights were cancelled in Koltsovo in one week due to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano located within 200 km of Reykjavik, Iceland.

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs declared the results of its Best Russian Enterprises contest for 2009. The winners and the nominees received their awards during the Russian Business Week (which is the Union’s key event in the field of state-private cooperation). OAO Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) won the competition in the Best Innovational Project category, the company’s PR Department reports. Last year, MMK completed a major investment project on putting up a hi-tech plate iron production facility on its premises. This plate iron is popular with the O&G

On April 8, 2010, the interest rate for Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) BO-05 bonds was determined in the course of a tender. The bonds total to 8 billion RUR and are to be in circulation for 1,092 days (three years). Under the conditions of the bond issue, no en-route offers are provided; the coupon period comes to 182 days. The potential investors placed over 14.5 billion RUR worth of bids for the tender, which meant the issue was oversubscribed by 1.8 times. According to the results of the tender, the interest rate for the first coupon of MMK’s bonds was set at 7.65% a year,