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The Regions This Week
June 16, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Eastern Europe
More than 1,500 people were arrested on June 12 during protests orchestrated by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was detained by the police moments after leaving his apartment. Another leader, Ilya Yashin, was picked up in central Moscow and bundled into the back of a police van. Most of the arrests were in Moscow and St Petersburg but there were also significant rallies in some 200 cities across Russia.
The State Duma, the lower chamber of Rus- sian parliament, passed a controversial bill on a $5bn housing renovation project in Moscow on June 14. Under the scheme, more than 4,000 apartment blocks built in the 1950s and 1960s are to be demolished. There have been protests against the demolitions.
Almost 1,900 Ukrainians used their right to trav- el to the EU on the first day of the visa-free re- gime for citizens visiting the bloc for short-term stays, the country’s State Border Guard Service said on June 12.
The European Commission formally requested a mandate from EU member states to negoti- ate over the rules of operation that would apply to Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Nord Stream 2 would double the current 55bn cm/y capacity of Nord Stream 1 that runs beneath the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, circumventing Ukraine and other CEE countries.
Businessman Sergey Mikhailov filed a defama- tion lawsuit demanding RUB500,000 ($8,800) in compensation from opposition politician Alexey Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The lawsuit is related to the “Chaika” article, pub- lished on the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s web- site, calling Mikhailov a gangster.
Trade between Russia and China is estimated to rise to $80bn this year, Russia’s deputy economic and trade minister, Alexei Gruzdev, told TASS.
Russia’s ruble-denominated Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX) slumped to the low- est level in a year on June 15 after the US gov- ernment codified sanctions on Russia into law and tightened the regime of restrictions in the first step of what could turn into much more painful and long-term sanctions regime.
Russia's biggest gold producer Polyus expects to raise $810mn (€721mn) selling shares in Moscow and London later in June as Russian mining giants look to return to international stock markets, Bloomberg reported. According to the report, Polyus, which is controlled by the family of billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, will offer between 7% and 9% of its stock at a price that puts the value of the entire company at $9bn.
DP Eurasia, master franchisee of Domino’s Pizza in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, announced on June 15 the price range for its planned IPO on the London Stock Exchange was at 200 pence to 230 pence per share. That im- plied “a market capitalisation of between £291mn (€334mn) and £331mn (€379mn)”.
Yamal LNG signed agreements with several Eu- ropean banks, including Raiffeisen Bank Inter- national and Intesa Sanpaolo, on 14-year credit line facilities of up to €425mn, the management of the Russian integrated project said. The facili- ties are at annual interest rates ranging from Euribor 6M plus 1.75% to Euribor 6M plus 2.3%.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has simpli- fied the procedure for reorganisation of banks through mergers, which will enable banks "to shorten significantly the duration of the reorgani- sation process.”
Soviet-era plans to build a bridge from mainland Russia to Sakhalin island have been revived, but the final decision has not yet been taken, Presi- dent Vladimir Putin said during his annual tel- evised question and answer session on June 15.