25th May, 2005

After a spurt to the upside for no apparent reason on Tuesday, the Russian equity market corrected back down yesterday. Needless to say, yesterday’s widespread power outage knocked the wind out of trading. Mosenergo became the main whipping boy and bellwether UES also took a beating after President Putin’s statement that he would lay all the blame for the outage in Moscow and the entire Moscow region on the management of UES, which he blamed for giving short shrift to current operations while focusing solely on trouble-shooting.

After the major domestic trading platforms got back up and running (RTS at 2:30 pm and MICEX at 3 pm) blue chips made a feeble attempt to rally, only to roll back by the close.

Most Russian blue chips ended up in the red as a result of the mayhem caused by the power outage Wednesday, with the top decliners closing within a band ranging from -0.57% (Lukoil) to -1.52% (UES). NorNickel (+0.34%) saw modest gains. The RTS Index was fractionally down (-0.06%) to 669.24 on lower-than-average volumes amounting to $15 mln.

MICEX trading was also dampened by yesterday’s unexpected train of events, with the decliners falling within a band ranging from -1.03% (Tatneft) to -3.9% (Mosenergo). The MICEX Index settled at 595.75 (-1.58%) on volumes totaling $607.25 mln.

Meanwhile, Gazprom fell along with the market, shedding 0.65% on SPICEX, with the last deal closed at Rub 80.57 and a mere 1.5 mln shares changing hands.

Finam
Russian Brokerage Company
http://www.fin-rus.com