Chinese ATMs, Parallel Video Game Imports: Latest Business News for July 11

Russia

• The Central Bank of the Russian Federation responded to the idea of ​​the Ministry of Finance to create a stable currency in Russia, tied to a stable physical asset - the ruble, gold, oil or grain: the regulator is against it and considers the digital ruble the only alternative.

• The Russian government will create a federal register of long-term construction in the country. Authorities hope this will help complete 2,500 of these properties. The new registry will work by analogy with the registry of problematic objects in shared construction.

• The government is discussing candidates for the post of head of centers who will have to determine what software needs to be developed in order to completely abandon foreign products. Those responsible include the heads of Gazprom Neft, T Plus, Rostelecom, Aeroflot and others.
• Banks began switching to Chinese ATMs after American companies stopped supplying and servicing ATMs. Now in Russia there are about 187,500. This is enough to meet the demand of citizens, but in the future it may be difficult to reconfigure ATMs to accept new banknotes.
• The Ministry of Finance forecasts a budget deficit in the regions for the next two years. The entity's revenues increase by 26% in the first six months of 2022

Finance

• One of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, continued to process customer transactions in Iran despite US sanctions and a ban on doing business in that country, Reuters has learned. In March, after the imposition of Western sanctions against Russia, the cryptocurrency exchange declared that it “strictly complies with international sanctions.”

• The difference between the official rates of the dollar and the euro was reduced to 50 kopecks: the Central Bank of the Russian Federation set the dollar exchange rate on July 12 at 61.3 rubles, the euro - at 61.8 rubles .

Economy

• The authorities will expand the publication of statistical indicators related to citizens' income and GDP. Quarterly income estimates for the ten percent population groups and the share of the non-oil and gas sector of the economy will appear in the public domain.

Business

• The Ministry of Digital Development is discussing options to mitigate the bill on the introduction of billing fines for companies for personal data leakage. Therefore, it can be reduced in size or there will be no fine for the first incident. The companies insist that, in the context of the economic situation, a heavy liability for leaks will worsen the conditions for doing business.

• Kaspersky Lab has withdrawn from a project to create a smartphone intended for the Russian military and intelligence services. This is an "Aquarius" pocket personal computer (Aquarius NS M11).

• The AvtoVAZ company decided to resume the production of Lada Granta cars in the Cross version. The cost of the car starts at 722,300 rubles.

• The Swedish equipment manufacturer Electrolux will leave Russia, the business will be transferred to local top managers.

• Parallel import of video games for consoles and PC markets has started in Russia.
• Mercedes-Benz can sell the property of its Mercedes-Benz Rus dealer to one of the dealers. Possible contenders are Panavto, Avtodom, Avilon and Major.
• Catering manufacturers are asking the government for help. The closure of airports in the south and the fall in international traffic have paralyzed its business.

Services

• The website of the Depositphotos photo bank was not available due to the blocking of one of its pages at the request of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation. Access to the page dedicated to Russia's actions on the territory of Ukraine was restricted. Since the site uses the https network protocol, blocking one of the pages leads to the unavailability of the entire resource.

• "Yandex.Travel" began to display the conditions of flight fares and compare the prices of different airlines. Now users do not need to go to airline websites to get this information.