"We primarily believe that the main reason is that the equipment is worn out," said Magarita Nagoga, a Unified Electricity Systems spokeswoman.
Putin placed the blame right at the top.
"I think it's possible to talk about the inadequate attention that the UES leadership has paid to the current activities of the company," he said in televised comments.
His statement, coming only a few hours after the outages hit, was a sharp contrast to his often-criticized slow public responses to disasters such as the Kursk nuclear submarine sinking and last year's Beslan school-hostage crisis.
....
The electricity grid, Unified Energy Systems, is headed by Anatoly Chubais, widely despised by ordinary Russians as the architect of the privatization programs of the 1990s under which a few businessmen became extraordinarily wealthy while most Russians watched their economic security slip away.
He also is a founder of one of the liberal parties that has consistently criticized Putin and Chubais has spoken out against the prosecution of powerful tycoon and Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Chubais, who survived a still unsolved assassination attempt in March, was quick to acknowledge responsibility in the outage.
The prosecutor-general's office later announced that it had opened a criminal inquiry into the Unified Energy Systems management for negligence and abuse of authority.
It appears to me that Chubais is responsible for the worn-out equipment, despite the fact that he was trying to attract investment to the industry in the last few years, and was warning that something like that can happen if no action is taken, and proposed several reform acts, which were torpedoed by Mr. Fradkov. And now he is to blame
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At least this is my understanding of the situation which I got from reading newspaper Vedomosti in the past year.
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