Translated material
Cleanup at Mosenergo
The company will again be led by a manager who is far from the power industry
There is another change of general director at Mosenergo. The last time the management of the capital's energy company changed was after the May 2005 accident . Then its director, Arkady Evstafiev, was fired from the company and was replaced by the most experienced power engineer from the RAO UES of Russia team , Anatoly Kopsov . Now that Gazprom has gained control over Mosenergo, Mr. Kopsov is no longer needed. Starting today, he is forced to give up his post to Vitaly Yakovlev, who moved to the energy company from Vostokgazprom (before that, in 1997-2003, he worked for the audit company KPMG). Thus, we can say that in the capital’s energy system, as once in RAO UES, there is a change in the generation of energy managers to financier managers. It is already known that Mr. Kopsov is leaving almost his entire team, who moved from RAO in 2005. And the question remains open as to how uninterrupted energy supply to the capital will be ensured while new professionals are found, who are no longer available on the market.Although Mr. Kopsov's resignation was predicted, it was still unexpected. The general director of Mosenergo, according to a source close to Gazprom, was removed from his post due to the fact that the new owner was not satisfied with the results of the company’s work last year. And as soon as the preliminary reporting appeared, the issue was brought to a meeting of the board of directors. However, the personnel issue was not on the agenda of yesterday's meeting. It was additionally introduced and discussed behind closed doors.
It is well known that the conflict between Mr. Kopsov and the managers of the gas concern responsible for the electric power industry does not lie at all in the results of work last year. Mr. Kopsov, as an experienced power plant builder, has launched large-scale investment activities in the capital region. It is thanks to him that Vladimir Putin and Anatoly Chubais can say that new power units began to appear at thermal power plants in Moscow - nothing like this has happened for more than 15 years. However, he did not allow the Gazprom team to change construction plans (in the direction of increasing costs) and did not allow it to access financial flows, say Mosenergo managers close to Mr. Kopsov. This is what provoked the conflict. It was hardly possible to fire an undesirable general director right away: after all, at that time the gas concern still had very little experience in managing the electric power industry.
A source at RAO UES says that the topic of the timing of Mr. Kopsov’s resignation was the subject of intensive negotiations, in which Anatoly Chubais, the head of the board of directors of RAO Alexander Voloshin and the head of Gazprom Alexey Miller were one way or another involved. In recent days there have been two options: from April 1 or at the end of May - after the meeting of Mosenergo shareholders, which is scheduled for May 18. As a result, the gas monopoly, which had the last word, decided not to hesitate. The explanation for the speed with which Mr. Kopsov’s resignation occurred may be due to the fact that the managers responsible for Gazprom’s electric power activities are close not so much to the management of Gazprom as to the shareholders of Gazfond - for them it may be important there was a rush to make the necessary decisions before the country's new president took office.
The fate of Mr. Kopsov was such that he was fired from RAO for virtually nothing: Vladimir Putin demanded personnel decisions at RAO for the crisis in Primorye, and since the Far Eastern region was supervised by Mr. Kopsov (but did not make decisions that led to large-scale power outages, since he had just been assigned to this area of work), then it was he who suffered. Then he didn’t even have time to start building new power plants. Now this is done by investors whom Mr. Chubais managed to attract to the industry. It seems that the same thing happened at Mosenergo: Mr. Kopsov was thrown in to save the capital’s energy sector from the crisis, and this salvation was precisely in the construction of power plants.
It remains unclear how, with a complete change of top management, Mosenergo will be able to avoid delaying the construction of power units.
Gazprom declined to make official comments yesterday. The head of RAO's media relations department, Margarita Nagoga, told Vremya Novostei that Gazprom acted at least unethically by not allowing Mr. Kopsov to even complete the construction of the power unit at CHPP-21, which is scheduled to be commissioned in May of this year. In principle, according to her, RAO considers Mr. Kopsov one of the best professional energy workers in the country, and in this regard, the actions of the new owner of Mosenergo look very, very strange.