URSA Bank retired ?59m worth of bonds and liabilities at par by February 11, 2009 after declaring early in January that they were planning on buying out their ?400m-issue of Euro bonds. The schedule of this buy-out program provides for acquiring the Euro bonds issued by URSA Finance Plc in May 2007; the coupon yield was determined at 7% a year, while the bonds were to be in circulation for three years. URSA Bank intends to buy the bonds on the public market as well as through private deals. ‘URSA Bank is known as a company that cares about its investors and partners’ interests and offers all

Ural Federal District’s division of the Federal Financial Market Service’s officials carried out a scheduled inspection on Bank24.ru’s premises and detected that the bank was actually violating the Russian legislation. As a result, the company was ordered to eliminate these violations.

The checks and inspections carried out by Sverdlovsk Region’s public prosecution authorities revealed that Yekaterinburg-based Uralmashzavod had over 60 million RUR worth of wage arrears, the spokesperson for the Russian Federation’s General Public Prosecutor reports. Upon the authorities’ order, the wages were paid to the workers; besides, the employees were given 777,700 RUR to make up for the delay. What is more, Uralmash-Drilling Machinery also owed its workers 10 million RUR worth of wages; following the inspection and the public prosecution authorities’ order, all the sums were handed

Leader Holding Company sold its 33.3216% shareholding in CIT Capital to STANMORLAND INVESMENTS LIMITED and CHARISMA COMMERCIAL GROUP INC. The former bought a 24% shareholding in CIT Capital; the latter acquired the 9.3216% one. The court actually declared CIT Capital insolvent on December 27, 2008; the decision was taken on the basis of CIT Capital’s application where the company explained that they owed their creditors over 3.982 billion RUR. At the moment, the business has 16.708 million RUR worth of top-priority commitments, whereas a number of general jurisdiction, arbitration, and

SKB-Bank topped the Urals’ businesses activity index rating compiled by Kommersant Publishing House’s analysts; the No.1 position was scored by the bank in the Finances category. ‘SKB-Bank was definitely the company most frequently mentioned or featured on Kommersant-Ural’s pages last year, leaving all the other banks behind,’ the bank’s press officer says. The rating assessors report the bank was actually referred to by the magazine thirty-two times in 2008 in comparison with twenty times a year earlier (which still secured the bank the top position in the rating in 2007). As for 2006,

‘The citizens of the EU’s sixteen countries located within the Euro zone came to believe in the banking system at the time of a global financial crisis,’ Bank Monetniy Dom reports. According to the European Central Bank, people started to spend less and to place more money on bank deposits. By the end of December 2008, for instance, 1,795 trillion euros had been kept in the form of bank deposits within the Euro zone, which exceeded the figures for 2007 by 1.6%. A certain increase in the bank deposit volume could be noticed in Russia as well. For one, Russian people deposited over 400 billion

Metallosnabzheniye I Sbyt magazine came up with the results on the survey targeted at selecting the best ferrous and non-ferrous metals manufacturers and traders in the second half of 2008. The magazine reports their rating is compiled on the basis of the questionnaires filled in by the customers and the market experts’ responses. As for the criteria, what the magazine took into account was the delivery volumes, services rendered, the quality of produce, and the ability to meet one’s contractual obligations in full. In addition, the rating was also influenced by the factors that kept

Yekaterinburg-based Koltsovo Airport and Rusgrad Construction Company are believed to have violated the law on infrastructure systems hookup, the regional public prosecution authorities for transportation report. While Rusgrad was putting up a hotel complex on the land allotment provided by Koltsovo Airport, the electricity was being supplied without any permission from Ural Federal District’s division of Rostechnadzor (the state technological safety watchdog). What is more, the builder never signed any electricity supply agreements. Koltsovo Airport and Rusgrad’s management have been ordered

‘We have been gradually switching our workers to a shorter working day and sending them on forced leaves since November 2008. During the current financial crisis, our shipments output went down by 50% to 60%, that is, from 450 million RUR to 150 million RUR worth of produce,’ Uralmash Machine-Building Corporation’s General Director Nazim Efendiev said in the course of a round table discussion on the crisis-defying measures in the industrial sector. ‘Last fall, even the contracts we got prepaid on had to be halted because of the crisis. Moreover, some of our customers are even unable to pay

‘UC RUSAL owes our company scores of millions of rubles for the goods we delivered to them as early as six months ago. This February, RUSAL has sent us a letter asking for a thirty-percent discount on the machinery we have already shipped (and which they are using already). If we agree, Uralpromoborudovaniye will be placed on UC RUSAL’s top priority creditors list; if we don’t, we’ll only be on the sixth-order list. Yet even if we go for the first option, it’s still unclear just when exactly we’ll get paid, since the payment date hasn’t been set. RUSAL claims the debt will be paid off all in

‘The current economic crisis in Russia opens way to raider attacks and hostile takeovers. Economic troubles (mainly companies’ debts) make businesses more vulnerable and less capable of countering such strikes. Living within the crisis information field lets offenders hide their attacks under the overall deluge of negative data; alternatively, takeover attempts can be easily disguised as ‘financial aid’. All this poses additional threats for a business’s economic security,’ Europe-Asia Information and Consulting Center’s General Director Oleg Borisov said to an UrBC reporter. ‘We haven’t got

Ural Airlines is to start operating its new Saint Petersburg-Kulyab flights on February 18, 2009. The flights are to be operated once a week, that is, every Wednesday. The airplane takes off in Saint Petersburg at 12.15 PM and arrives in Kulyab at 7.10 PM. The cheapest tickets are available for ?235 (plus the fuel fee). Then, the plane leaves Kulyab at 8.40 PM and arrives in Saint Petersburg at 12.05 AM on Thursday. The cheapest tickets are available for ?230 (plus the fuel fee). The departure and arrival time is local, the company’s press officer reports. Once the carrier acquired more A 320

‘Sverdlovsk Region’s companies owed their gas suppliers 4.862 billion RUR at the beginning of February, while the sum owed by TGK-9 (our greatest debtor) really did exceed 1.5 billion RUR. Nevertheless, this company had only paid 116 million RUR off by February 9, 2009,’ Itera O&G Company’s PR Director Viktor Cheremukhin said to an UrBC reporter. ‘In case TGK-9 fails to pay off the remainder of its natural gas debt, Uralsevergaz will have to gradually introduce gas supply limits starting February 15, 2009. We understand that this is going to badly affect Sverdlovsk Region’s economy, but

‘Our tenants have already got the opportunity to have their offices and shops in KomsoMall Trade & Entertainment Center remodeled and furnished. Nevertheless, the final commissioning of the mall has been postponed until April 2009. I believe that this is a common thing in the building industry,’ says DVI Group’s Press Service Director Oleg Lopatin. The mall was originally expected to have been commissioned in February 2009; the center’s total area comes to about 67,200 square meters.

‘Getting the money owed to them back in time is becoming a matter of survival for many businesses at the moment. However, the currently existing legal instruments cannot provide the legitimate, fast, and efficient ways of getting these sums back. An arbitration court might keep looking into the accounts receivable-related cases for years, and bankruptcy proceedings also take a long time to complete. In fact, this time is long enough for a debtor to close down or remove all of its liquid assets elsewhere. As a result, getting one’s money paid back turns out to be extremely difficult,’ says

The Russian Federation Ministry of Regional Development claims in court that Alfa-Bank and Transstroy Engineering Corporation should pay $19m and $9m, respectively, for delay with the commissioning of the dam that protects Saint Petersburg from floods, Kommersant reports. According to the newspaper, Transstroy Engineering Corporation (a member of Oleg Deripaska’s Transstroy) and Rosstroy signed a 4.7-billion-ruble agreement regarding the construction of the dam’s second portion in October 2005. After Rosstroy went into liquidation in May 2008, the Russian Federation Ministry of Regional

Bank Severnaya Kazna (Alfa-Bank’s asset at the moment) is going to close down two more of its additional offices in Sverdlovsk Region. One of the outlets is located at 12a Belorechenskaya St. in Yekaterinburg, another one at 45a Pobeda St. in Nizhniy Tagil. Both offices will last welcome their customers on February 17, 2009. After this, the bank’s private customers based in Nizhniy Tagil can be serviced in the office located at 13 Vagonostroiteli St., while businesses can keep using the bank’s outlet at 45a Pobeda St. in Nizhniy Tagil through April 29, 2009.

According to Interfax-CEA’s rating, METCOMBANK proved the Urals’ No.1 bank with the fastest-growing assets: these rose by 40.1% over the year 2008. The ranking was based on the data available as of December 31, 2008 and involved 987 banks altogether, including 56 banks based in Ural Federal District, METCOMBANK’s press officer reports. The bank’s assets amounted to 19,091,300,000 RUR on December 31, 2008, thus securing METCOMBANK a ranking promotion from the 132nd position to the 118th one from the top. ‘Despite the current financial crisis, we managed to make all of our development plans

Interfax-CEA (Center for Economic Analysis) did a research on the Russian banking sector’s activity last year, looking into the banks’ basic performance indicators as well as the volume and structure of their assets and liabilities. As a matter of fact, three Sverdlovsk Region-based banks were featured in the rating of Russia’s Top 100 banks with the largest asset volume. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development (UBRD) scored the highest position of the three, with its asset volume reaching 50,206,030,000 RUR by the end of 2008 (which was 32.02% better than at the beginning of the

Bank Severnaya Kazna (Alfa-Bank’s asset at the moment) announced it was going to launch a re-branding campaign that will leave one of their Yekaterinburg offices (located at 2 Kuznetsov St.) completely remodeled. The office will close down for refurbishing on February 13, 2009. Alfa-Bank expects to open its own additional office on these premises on March 16, 2009.