A press conference on the bank’s new developmental stages organized by URSA Bank’s top management and the bank’s business partners was held in Interfax’s press center. It was announced that Russia New Growth Fund managed by Troika Capital Partners (TCP) had bought URSA Bank’s shareholding consisting of 7.4% of the bank’s ordinary shares acquired from S.M. Capital Group. Experts’ estimates of the bank’s capitalization range from $2.5bn to $2.4bn.

URSA Bank has been doing business with Troika Dialog for a quite a while now; their latest success story involved going through with two preference share issues in 2006 and 2007 that made URSA Bank’s capital rise by $488m.

'We see this transaction as a way of improving on our shareholder base; besides, we hope it will promote more expert evaluation of our performance by some foreign investors,’ URSA Bank’s Chairman Igor Kim said.