The chief of Moscow's electricity utility resigned Saturday after President Vladimir Putin accused the company's leadership of incompetence in a fresh swipe at the utility over the massive power outage last week.

Arkady Yevstafyev offered his resignation as general director of Moscow's power utility Mosenergo, a subsidiary of the country's electricity monopoly Unified Energy System (UES), Andrei Trapeznikov, a senior UES manager told the Interfax news agency.

"The reason for his resignation is the unsatisfactory assessment of the Mosenergo management made by President Vladimir Putin at a conference Saturday with the members of the (Russian) Security Council," Trapeznikov said.

Trapeznikov said Mosenergo deputy general director Vladislav Nazin also resigned and another deputy general director Vladimir Chistyakov was named acting general director of the company.

Yevstafyev's resignation came just hours after Putin launched a scathing attack at the company's leadership in the wake of the power outage that began last 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.

Frequent breakdowns in the energy system point to "clear systemic management problems," Putin told the meeting, according to the Kremlin's press service.

Putin slammed the company's calls for price hikes to prevent future power breakdowns, describing such plans as "a form of blackmail" on the consumers.

"I was taken aback to hear the new management of Mosenergo's thoughts on this question they speak of the need for a several-fold increase in electricity prices, supposedly so as to avoid future energy crises," Putin said.

"This is simply a form of blackmail designed to pursue group and corporate interests at the consumer's expense at the expense of the entire public," Putin said.

Putin's criticism Saturday was reminiscent of the harsh rhetoric he used against the company in his initial reaction to the blackout, where he blamed the UES for "a lack of attention" to the current activity of the company.

A day before Yevstafyev resigned, Andrei Malyshev, acting chief of Russia's technological watchdog Rostekhnadzor also accused the UES of failing to fix problems in the area's power grid that were found before the power outage.

Source: Xinhua