‘UC RUSAL owes our company scores of millions of rubles for the goods we delivered to them as early as six months ago. This February, RUSAL has sent us a letter asking for a thirty-percent discount on the machinery we have already shipped (and which they are using already). If we agree, Uralpromoborudovaniye will be placed on UC RUSAL’s top priority creditors list; if we don’t, we’ll only be on the sixth-order list. Yet even if we go for the first option, it’s still unclear just when exactly we’ll get paid, since the payment date hasn’t been set. RUSAL claims the debt will be paid off all in one go. If we offer them a twenty-percent discount, the sum will be split in two portions, but the dates remain unclear as well,’ the General Director of Uralpromoborudovaniye Andrei Besedin said in the course of a round table discussion on the crisis-defying measures in the industrial sector.

‘Uralpromoborudovaniye is not the only company facing such problems. We were told by one of our customers that UC RUSAL asked them for a 50% discount and a ninety-day delay in payment into the bargain,’ says Terra Yure’s Director Tatiana Zabavkina.