Grossmart, a hypermarket located in Park House mall at 50 Sulimov St. in Yekaterinburg, has been exposing a much poorer range of some products lately; moreover, some of the shelves were even dismantled altogether.

Grossmart, with its 4,200 square meters of trade area, was opened on August 21, 2005. It then offered customers a wide assortment of foods, including more than two hundred kinds of vegetables and fruit, fifty or so kinds of meat and meat products, fish, and seafood, as well as 2,200 kinds of strong drinks.

The hypermarket has not provided any explanations yet; Grossmart’s director Elena Surina is currently away on business.

In the meantime, due to Marta Holding’s clashes with RTM, the developer business, in May 2008 (the clash had to do with paying Grossmart’s rent in a number of Russian cities), RTM managed to stop the hypermarkets’ operation in Krasnoyarsk, Tula, and Saint Petersburg. RTM reports Grossmart kept on violating the renting agreement and stopped paying the rent altogether in February 2008. Marta Holding’s representatives denied these claims and said they were ready to take the issue to court.

‘We are not going to close down these chain stores; nor do we intend to sell them. We mean to find a strategic investor in the very near future and keep on working as usual,’ Marta Holding’s spokesman Timofei Surovtsev said to UrBC.