The main events by the morning: August 12

• Israel is expecting an Iranian attack. Israeli intelligence expects that in the coming days Iran may retaliate for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Axios reports.

• Subscribers of more than 135 regional telecom operators in Russia are breaking contracts due to failures in YouTube and other Google services. In response, the relevant associations asked the Ministry of Finance and Roskomnadzor to issue an official statement explaining the reasons for the slowdown in services and the «uneven degradation» of various telecom companies.

• The new company is preparing for an IPO on the Moscow Stock Exchange. Russia's largest supplier of engineering systems, ETM (LLC TD Elektrotekhmontazh), plans to hold an IPO on the Moscow Stock Exchange by the end of 2024. The company expects to attract at least 10 billion rubles.

• Russian banks have sharply reduced foreign currency lending to businesses. In June 2024, Russian banks significantly reduced the volume of business loans in foreign currency. The volume of corporate loans in foreign currency fell by 27.6% to 34.99 billion yuan. Experts attribute this to the deterioration of the situation with yuan liquidity in the Russian market.

• The hotel boom in Russia. In 2024, against the background of the development of tourism in Russia, developers plan to build 3,000 hotel rooms, which is twice as much as last year. More than 70% of these numbers will be managed by major network operators.