Yesterday, Viktor Yanukovych began his visit to Luhansk with a statement that he had not misspoke on Thursday in Brussels when he said that Ukraine was not ready to join the NATO Membership Action Plan. The statement caused a huge scandal in Kyiv.

Boris Prigozhin, CEO of the Kashirsky Dvor Group of Companies, told Vedomosti that Kashirsky Dvor will be opening trade and warehouse complexes of the same name in Russian regions. According to him, the company has already purchased a plot of land of approximately 6 hectares within the city of Kazan, where a trade and warehouse center of approximately 10,000–15,000 sq. m. will be built within the next two years. This information was confirmed by an employee of the Kazan city administration.

For the past 10 years, Credit Suisse has been copying the UBS strategy. The Zurich banks entered the insurance market with a difference of only one year: UBS bought 25% of Swiss Life in 1996, and Credit Suisse acquired Winterthur Insurance in 1997. In 2003, UBS transformed several small private banks into a single asset management division, and Credit Suisse intends to do the same in 2007. Meanwhile, the banks parted ways with the insurance business: UBS in 1999, Credit Suisse in 2006.

The events of the last few weeks in Russia are forcing us to talk again about the rather explosive topic of national relations. It is becoming increasingly clear that just as a fashionable tailcoat will not completely cover up primitive instincts, no political correctness will kill the caveman nationalism in people. Moreover, as the events in Kondopoga and before that in the Parisian suburbs clearly showed, both sides of the confrontation are usually intolerant.

Last week, the German concern Eckes-Granini reached an agreement with Nidan to bottle juices at the company's plant near Moscow from mid-October, Nidan Soki CEO Andrey Yanovsky told Vedomosti. "We will bottle brands at Nidan that are already produced in Russia," noted Roman Bezdudny, Marketing Manager at Eckes-Granini Rus LLC.

Andrei Fursenko once admitted that he really didn't want to join the government, but gave in to the persuasion of Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov. As Minister of Education and Science, he was attacked by the National Bolsheviks, publicly booed by Orthodox radicals, and scientists from the Academy of Sciences waved posters with the slogans "Was Lysenko, now Fursenko" in front of the Government House. The St. Petersburg physicist endures all this with philosophical calm.

Expenditures under the “national defense” section in functional terms (for all departments) in the draft 2007 budget should increase by 23.3% to 821.2 billion rubles, for national security and law enforcement – ​​by 22.7% to 664.8 billion rubles, and for the prevention and elimination of consequences of emergency situations and natural disasters – by 35.8% to 40.2 billion rubles.

According to the analytical company ACM-Consulting, at the end of June there were 370,000 DAMPS subscribers in Russia. VimpelCom, which started in 1992 with the AMPS standard (the analog predecessor of DAMPS), remains one of the largest Russian DAMPS operators to this day. According to the company itself, it services about 92,000 subscribers of this standard in eight cities in Russia. The operator recently launched a program in Moscow and Samara to transfer these clients to the GSM network.

The government initiated tax reform in 2000, when the share of salaries paid in envelopes exceeded 35% (Rosstat estimates it by comparing company data with consumer spending and adjusting for savings). Entrepreneurs explained their reluctance to pay employees in the open by excessively high salary taxes: income tax reached 30% at the time, and the single social tax was 35.6%.

Officials take in different ways - this can be seen even in official police reports. For example, the deputy head of the Federal Tax Service's credit organizations department, Oleg Alekseyev, was arrested immediately after he was handed a case with $1 million. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, two deputy mayors of Yakutsk - Elizaveta Nikolaeva and Sergei Petrov - took 2 million rubles in bank bills from builders.

In 2003, the Ministry of Natural Resources approved a positive conclusion of the environmental assessment for the integrated development of the Piltun-Astokhskoye and Lunskoye fields within the framework of Sakhalin-2. In August, Rosprirodnadzor decided to study the project again. It conducted a comprehensive inspection of the feasibility study, recommendations issued upon approval of the environmental assessment, and water use licenses.

Although in 2003 President Vladimir Putin stated that he considered the sale of land plots under privatized enterprises unfair, the Ministry of Economic Development proposed setting the buyout price at 2.5% of the cadastral value, and 20% for Moscow and St. Petersburg. If the owners of enterprises in the two capitals decide to repurpose the property, they will have to pay an additional 80% of the cadastral value.

In early 2000, shortly before the bankruptcy proceedings began, Samson sold about 50 hectares of land on which the plant is located to Salolin, a St. Petersburg manufacturer of margarine base, said Khamzat Arsamakov, who until Saturday held the position of general director of OOO Samson (see inset). The parties agreed that after the bankruptcy proceedings were completed, Salolin would sell the land to OOO Samson-K, a management company created by MIB, Arsamakov claims.

Prodimex is exploring the possibility of holding an IPO on Russian stock exchanges next year, and yesterday MDM Bank (the organizer of the placement) published a credit study of the group dedicated to the planned issue of $100 million CLN in the next two weeks. This document discloses for the first time the structure of the group, its owners and financial indicators. The Russian companies of the group are consolidated on the balance sheet of the United Sugar Company, the study states.

With money The US Department of Justice called the actions of Congressman Randall Cunningham, who had a price list for bribes, “unprecedented.” For a $16 million Defense Department contract, he asked for $140,000 in cash and a yacht. For every additional $1 million in the contract, the congressman had to be given $50,000. In total, Cunningham received $2.4 million. In March 2006, he was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison. But his case can hardly be called unprecedented.