The matter concerns yesterday's huge power outage, which paralyzed Moscow and a vast area around, neighboring regions included, for several hours. Economic damage exceeds a billion US dollars, on preliminary estimations.
The Rodina is posing as a political party on guard of vital interests of the people-in-the-street.
"We are ready with standard patterns for complaints. They are to be found on the party website. What we want is mass litigation with the UES, its boss Chubais, and the Mosenergo, its city branch," Dmitri Rogozin, Rodina parliamentary group leader, said today.
"The matter concerns consumers' rights," he pointed out, adding that party lawyers were willing to offer free legal advice.
"Mr. Chubais is an extremely bad manager, and not the man to lead an energy monopoly on which human life closely depends in this cold northern country," he went on.
People are baffled to see revenues from exorbitant electricity fees vanishing. These revenues ought to fund an UES reform, while they go to pay the company bosses' dividends, Mr. Rogozin pointed out to highlight a recent decision on which top UES officers were to receive a million dollars each as dividends. Meanwhile, nothing is being done about company equipment wear-and-tear. Thus, the Chagino substation had not its machinery updated since the early 1960s, as Chubais acknowledged afterwards. Situated in Kapotnya, Moscow's southeast, it was the ill-fated project whose fire caused local power grids switching off one by one.
"So you see-they have the money to pay fat dividends but are too poor to afford the grid modernized," the parliamentarian sarcastically remarked.
The Rodina group intends to address a session of the State Duma, lower house, with a demand to debate a draft appeal to the federal President "on the entire range of the issues involved-in particular, a power industrial reform and on the prospects to fire Chubais".
"Chubais personifies the era of barbaric capitalism," so he ought to quit his job, added Rogozin.
