Putin slams power monopoly after big Moscow outage
Wed May 25, 2005 09:19 AM ETBy Christian Lowe
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Moscow was plunged into chaos on Wednesday after a big power outage that President Vladimir Putin blamed on the state-owned electricity monopoly headed by a liberal politician viewed with suspicion by the Kremlin.
The outage, caused by a fire in a substation, shut the stock exchange, crippled transport and threatened mobile phone links in the sweltering Russian capital.
Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said the breakdown was caused by a fire and explosion overnight at an electricity substation. There was no evidence of a terrorist attack, he said.
But Putin, who delayed a provincial trip because of the crisis, pointed the finger at the management of Unified Energy System whose chief executive is Anatoly Chubais, one of the architects of the post-Soviet market revolution whose liberal views sit uneasily with Kremlin hard-liners.
"It is entirely possible to talk about a lack of attention on the part of RAO UES to the current activity of the company.
"They should work not only on global problems about company policy and its restructuring, but also pay attention to current activity," Putin said in televised remarks.
Chubais, one of Russia's best known figures who survived an assassination attempt in March, was quoted as saying he accepted full responsibility for the outage.
Putin was clearly suggesting that Chubais was spending too much time on his widely-publicised plans for a corporate restructuring of the electricity behemoth and was losing sight of the operational running of the firm.
Though a leader of the Union of Right Forces party, Chubais quit active politics in 1998 to lead UES. He now heads a company with annual revenues of $21.6 billion and a market capitalization of $12.4 billion.
While he has generally refrained from open criticism of Kremlin policy, Chubais was one of the few public figures inside Russia to condemn the prosecution of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky who is on trial for fraud and tax evasion.
TRADING HALTED
Moscow's main MICEX foreign exchange and share market stopped trading for several hours because, though it had power, many of its clients did not. It reopened later in the afternoon.
The underground (metro) system ground to a halt, leaving more than 20,000 passengers stranded below ground in the capital which is experiencing a heatwave with temperatures around 30 C (85 Fahrenheit).
The passengers were evacuated after an hour, Svetlana Czareva, head of the metro's press office, told Reuters.
"There was a fire and explosion at the Chagino substation," said Khristenko, referring to a locality south-east of Moscow. "As a result of the explosion several transformers were destroyed."
He put it down to the age of the Soviet-era substation, built in 1963.
"According to the information I have ... there is no evidence of terrorism," he told reporters. "Most likely the problem was old equipment."
The defense ministry helped out by feeding some of its own power into the civilian grid.
Trams and trolleybuses came to a standstill and traffic lights stopped working, causing a flurry of road traffic accidents and massive traffic congestion.
Suburban commuter trains, including one to a major city international airport, on several routes were also affected. Water supplies to homes were disrupted.
Two Russian mobile phone operators said they were working on reserve power and would have to switch off the network if electricity was not restored soon.
RAO UES said the outage had hit between 10 and 12 percent of capacity in Moscow and the surrounding region.
It said it hoped to restore power to essential users, such as hospitals, by about 1330 GMT and have the rest back to normal within 24 hours.
The problem at the substation forced engineers to switch off large parts of the power system to avoid overloading power lines, a spokeswoman said.
"Moscow was plunged into chaos on Wednesday after a big power outage that President Vladimir Putin blamed on the state-owned electricity monopoly headed by a liberal politician viewed with suspicion by the Kremlin."
Flashbacks to 1972 life in the Soviet Union.