Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said Saturday the city will sue the country's electricity monopoly Unified Energy System (UES) for damage caused by Wednesday's poweroutage that hobbled transport and plunged whole neighborhoods into darkness in the capital city.

Luzhkov said city authorities are assessing the loss and will file lawsuits claiming damages against the UES next week, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Luzhkov said the financial losses of the blackout, which stranded 20,000 subway riders, closed the city's two stock exchanges for hours and spoiled food in an unusual early summer heatwave, were "quite serious."

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said Saturday the city will sue the country's electricity monopoly Unified Energy System (UES) for damage caused by Wednesday's poweroutage that hobbled transport and plunged whole neighborhoods intodarkness in the capital city.

Luzhkov said city authorities are assessing the loss and will file lawsuits claiming damages against the UES next week, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Luzhkov said the financial losses of the blackout, which stranded 20,000 subway riders, closed the city's two stock exchanges for hours and spoiled food in an unusual early summer heatwave, were "quite serious."

The massive power outage began Wednesday when a power failure caused by an explosion and fire at a decades-old substation cascaded into other parts of the city's power grid. The UES said worn-out equipment might be to blame for the substation blast.

The mayor said he believed the blackout was caused not only by the substation blast but also by incompetent management.

His office has repeatedly warned about mismanagement at Mosenergo, a UES subsidiary that lights almost every bulb in Moscow and the Moscow region, and obsolete equipment in the energynetworks, Luzhkov said.

"Now a major incident in the power grid in the city and adjoining regions has exposed the things we have long been talking about," he said.

UES President Anatoly Chubais, who has borne the brunt of criticism for mismanagement of his company, ruled out his resignation Saturday.

"When I looked -- maybe in an emotional and purely human way --at those who had rallied together, full of joy and hope, to demand(my) dismissal ... I said, 'No, that's out of the question, absolutely out of the question, I won't make that kind of decision,'" Chubais told Russia's REN-TV, the Interfax news agency reported.

An unnamed spokesperson of Mosenergo said Saturday 60 percent of Moscow's power equipment is outdated and the company plans to invest nearly 3 billion rubles (107 million US dollars) every yearbefore 2010 in updating its obsolete power equipment. The sum onlyaccounts for 40 percent of money needed to overhaul the city's energy networks, the spokesperson added.

Semyon Dragulsky, director of the Russian Energy Efficiency Union, told Itar-Tass Friday Russia needs at least 50 billion US dollars to renovate its outdated energy system.

Source: Xinhua