In its boldest move yet to enforce a presidential decree on truth in advertising, the State Antitrust Committee announced Friday it will sue 11 Russian financial companies for running irresponsible ads.


"We have to wake up our dear financial pyramids," Natalya Fonaryova, deputy head of the committee, told a news conference.


She accused the 11 companies of promising high returns on deposits in violation of President Boris Yeltsin's June decree on irresponsible advertising, and said the committee would ask the court to suspend or revoke their licenses.


The banks and investment funds named included Zodiac-Finance, Telemarket, Skorpio, X-1, Kreig, Sberbank-Germes, Sibir-Pushnina, Industria-Servis, Svetlana and Binitek.


The committee had previously issued only warnings to investment companies and to the media that run their advertisements, threatening action if they did not change their ways. The decree does not hold the media directly responsible for the ads they carry.


Fonaryova showed reporters a clip of an Industria-Servis ad in an August issue of the newspaper Tsentr-Plyus, which promised interest rates of 170 percent on six-month


ruble deposit,s and


40 percent on two-week deposits.


Under Yeltsin's decree, companies are not allowed to "announce guarantees, promises and forecasts on their future effectiveness."


"All financial structures, under present conditions, need a lot of advertising to succeed," Fonaryova said. "But we must think about the third party in this deal: the consumer."


But Vyacheslav Parshin, a member of the board at Industria-Servis, said in a telephone interview that the bank had already changed its ads to comply with the antitrust committee's demands.


"As far as two months ago we received two letters from them, and we immediately changed our ads in the way they demanded," he said. "There is much misunderstanding between us and the Antitrust Committee on how to interpret the decree."


The decree was aimed at the myriad investment companies that have emerged on the Russian financial market over the past year, luring Russians with billboard, newspaper, radio and television ads promising huge and quick returns.


Many of them have turned out to be frauds, duping millions of inexperienced investors out of their life savings.


Such companies often operate without proper licences.


Earlier this year, the Central Bank issued a list of about 50 financial companies that were accepting deposits without having obtained a banking licence.


Fonaryova said if any of the companies on the antitrust committee's list turned out to be operating without a licence, its case would be passed on to the state prosecutor, and any advertising contracts it had signed would be immediately canceled.


Svetlana Sveshnikova, deputy head of the advertising department at the newspaper Kuranty, which runs the ads of three companies on the Antitrust Committee's list, said the newspaper would suffer "significant losses" if the companies stop advertising.


"You understand that only companies that are involved in not quite clean business can afford crazy money on advertising," she said. "But what can we do? We need money."


She said it was impossible for a newspaper to check whether a company was doing honest business, since most of them placed ads through agencies.