Three Chinese banks stopped accepting payments from the Russian Federation, Baltika alcoholic cocktails: the main thing on February 21

World

• Chinese banks Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank (CCB) and Bank of China have stopped accepting payments from financial organizations sanctioned by Russia.
• The financial market “Vyberu.ru” entered the Uzbek market by launching a platform with banking and microfinance products for individuals and companies.
• The EU will lift sanctions against Arkady Volozh, Reuters has learned. The co-founder of Yandex will be one of three people who will be excluded from the sanctions list.

Finance

• On February 21, the Central Bank of Russia revoked Qiwi Bank’s banking license. This is the first withdrawal since August 2022.
• Qiwi’s deposit receipts fell by at least 50%, reaching 240.5 rubles, in the context of the revocation of the Central Bank’s license to Qiwi Bank. The Moscow Stock Exchange announced the second discrete auction of the company’s securities of the day.
• We will tell you what to do if you have a deposit in Qiwi Bank and funds in your Qiwi wallet, to whom and when the funds will be returned, and what to do if you have problems paying for services.
• The Central Bank established the fact of market manipulation in the context of the alleged bankruptcy petition filed by the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange. The exchange made no such request, a Bank of Russia inspection showed. It appeared in the files of the Moscow Arbitration Court at the end of November 2023.

Russia

• The Ministry of Digital Development plans to change the rules for including companies in the register of accredited IT companies in such a way as to prevent the inclusion of foreign structures in it. Now the registry includes subsidiaries of Huawei, Samsung and others.
• The government withdrew its positive opinion on the parliamentary bill with amendments to the Administrative Code after the relevant committee of the State Duma, when preparing the document for the second reading, excluded from it the provision on fines for failure to sell foreign currency earnings , as Vedomosti learned. .
• The assets of the Rolf car dealership were recovered in favor of the State. The decision was made by the St. Petersburg court at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Since the end of 2023, Rolf’s shares have been under the temporary management of the Federal Property Management Agency.

Business

• The startup with Russian roots RetailHub, which develops a vertical SaaS solution for retail chains and aggregators, has attracted investments of 300 thousand dollars. RetailHub allows retailers to have products on shelves on time.
• Samolet Group entered the Russian IT services market with its own platform, Samolet 10D. The developer has been developing the platform since 2019, investments in the project amounted to approximately 3 billion rubles.
• France’s Danone, whose Russian assets were transferred to temporary management by the Federal Property Management Agency, will sell its business in Russia to Tatarstan’s Vamin company for 17.7 billion rubles.
• Baltika decided to register the Platina Latina brand logo in two classes of the International Classification of Standards, which correspond to beer and strong alcohol, which includes vodka, rum, bitters, alcoholic cocktails and other beverages.
• 27% of Russian companies have reduced working hours on Fridays. Basically, the hours have been reduced by an hour or an hour and a half. Employers are confident that this will increase employee loyalty.

Services and technologies

• Wildberries users reported problems when making transactions with Mastercard cards: they were disconnected from their personal account, attempts to pay for purchases ended unsuccessfully.
• Yandex Travels will help a large group check into a hotel. Groups of 3 to 10 people, when booking rooms, can choose how it is convenient for them to stay: all together or in different rooms.
• A user data breach occurred in the Atlas Bass ticket purchasing service. Phone numbers and technical order information were leaked online. The incident occurred in August 2023, but users were not notified until today.
• Translator trained by Yandex to edit and improve texts in English. For this, the YandexGPT neural network is used: the function can be applied both to the entire text and to a selected fragment.

Transport

• Business representatives began to choose Sheremetyevo Airport for business trips 42% more often. The average cost of air tickets abroad increased by a quarter and amounted to 56.4 thousand rubles, Aeroclub experts found out.