OREANDA-NEWS. On November 29, 2007 VTB Bank and the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company (the UMMC) have signed a Cooperation, reported the press-centre of VTB.

Agreement setting major lines for further development of the mutually rewarding cooperation between the Parties. For VTB the Agreement was signed by Andrei Kostin, Chairman and CEO of the Bank, for UMMC - by Andrei Kozitsyn, General Director of the company.

Within the framework of the Agreement, the UMMC will attract VTB as a major credit institution in the banking sphere. In addition to its standard services, VTB will take part in financing current activities, as well as investment projects and development programs of the UMMC, with fund raising from foreign financial institutions, including the use of the limits opened for the Bank in export and pre-export lending. 

The Agreement stipulates cooperation between VTB and the UMMC in financing corporate control deals, and also in arranging deals in the domestic and international financial markets, including securities trading.  

The Agreement signed is a further step towards developing partnerships between VTB and metal manufacture enterprises, which are among the priority lines of the Bank’s activities.  Developing partnerships with metallurgical enterprises, VTB strives to use a comprehensive approach and to meet its customers’ demand at all stages of growth and diversification of their business, offering them a wide range of banking services and products. Thus, within the framework of the strategy to enhance cooperation with the enterprises of UMMC Holding Group, started in 2003, the Bank made a decision to increase the lending limit to enterprises of the Group up to RUR 15 billion in 2006. Besides, a large-scale and long-term project of the Holding to create Yekaterinburg-City business centre is now jointly implemented by the Parties. Presently, the total volume of documentary-credit limits set by VTB to ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy has exceeded USD 6 billion.

For reference:
UMMC is a diversified holding with aggregate assets of more than 40 enterprises located in 11 Russian regions. Currently, the company is ranked 17th among the 400 largest companies of Russia in terms of sales volume. Gains for 2006 are RUR 197,0 billion. The company is ranked 2nd among the producers of refined copper in Russia (40% output of the Russian cathode copper); 25% of domestic market of rolling the non-ferrous metals; more than 50% of the European market of copper powder.