The state of events at Yekaterinburg Meatpacking Plant Ltd. puts its creditors in trying circumstances as neither the structure nor the management of the company have been determined and agreed upon. Nobody knows how the new team of executives will handle the company’s assets and liabilities, either – and the company’s official debt might come to more than 200m RUR. Financial market experts, however, believe the real indebtedness might amount to more than all of the company’s assets are worth.

Among the plant’s creditors are some federal and regional organizations that now have certain grounds for worrying about their investments. According to the data provided by one of the creditors, Yekaterinburg Meatpacking Plant Ltd. owed approximately 96m RUR to UralTransBank and 46m RUR to Vozrozhdeniye Bank in the middle of 2005. Already then, these debts posed a problem for both banks. The latter even had to close down its Yekaterinburg subsidiary, and UralTransBank got on the list of Russia’s five most unprofitable banks in the first half of 2005.