The Central Bank has forbidden 401 foreign and Russian companies from accepting credit card payments, but several company representatives said Thursday they were unaware of the ruling.


Viktor Doroshenko, spokesman for the Central Bank's Moscow branch, said the firms, including the American Medical Center, Sadko and a number of other well-known stores, lost the right to honor credit cards because they had neglected to submit quarterly reports on their hard currency dealings to the state bank.


"They have been deliberately withholding the reports," Doroshenko said. "We have to know what's going on at these companies and what they are hiding."


A Sadko representative said the credit card ban could be "very inconvenient" for the company's customers. Many clients of foreign stores prefer to pay with credit cards to avoid carrying large amounts of rubles.


Doroshenko said if the companies continue accepting credit cards, they will face criminal prosecution for trading without a license.


"When problems come up, like in the MMM case, we get the blame for the lack of control," he added.


Doroshenko said the Central Bank has sent official letters to all the 401 companies and their banks telling them the firms no longer had the right to accept hard currency in any form. Since trade outlets were barred from accepting foreign cash by President Boris Yeltsin's decree last year, the new order only involved credit cards, the bank spokesman said.


But Galina Chernova, deputy chief accountant for the Russian-Swiss company Sadko, which runs several popular supermarkets in Moscow, said the stores were still accepting credit cards Thursday.


She said the news of the Central Bank's ruling came as a complete surprise to her.


"If we stop taking credit cards, it's going to be very inconvenient for many of our customers," Chernova said, although she said she did not have information on what percentage of the company's sales were by credit card.


"I wish we had been warned about this in advance -- then we could have found a way to get around it."


Chernova believed it was possible that Sadko had failed to present financial reports to the Central Bank because she said the firm did not employ enough accountants to make up all the required reports.


"We would need to employ twice as many people to submit all the reports to every government office on time," she said. "The foreign partners in the company are simply astonished when they find out how many of these reports we have to file."


Susan Hecker, who is in charge of the American Medical Center's business operations, said Thursday afternoon that she had heard about the new ruling from a reporter 30 minutes before.


"I swear to God that was the first time I heard about it," she said. "I am frantically trying to get hold of our bank to find out what we violated, if anything."


She said that the AMC had submitted all the necessary reports on time and that she hoped the situation would clear up.


"We don't have an order, we've never been informed and I can't even think what the ramifications can be," she said, adding that the AMC was continuing to accept credit cards as well as rubles.


The Central Bank's Doroshenko said that even if the companies had not received the bank's letters yet because of some "technical problems," they had been warned that they were in violation of government regulations.


"We notified them in June that they faced losing their licenses if they didn't submit the quarterly reports by July 15," he said.


"They know what they are doing. They may simply be pretending that they know nothing."


The list of 401 companies includes a number of such unlikely organizations as the prestigious Moscow Foreign Relations Institute and Semashko Institute of Dentistry.


It also includes some relatively well-known companies, for example the Chrystal Motors car dealer, the Troika Tour travel agency, the Moskva Hotel and the restaurant at the Ukraine Hotel.