After rocky year, Vattenfall names new CEO

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- Swedish state-owned energy giant Vattenfall will replace its longtime CEO Lars Josefsson after he and his company endured a difficult year.

The former head of Dutch energy company Nuon, Oeystein Loeseth, 51, will succeed Josefsson, 59, "prior to the summer of 2010" per a timeline agreed earlier this summer, the Stockholm-based company said in a statement Monday. Until then, Loeseth will work as a deputy CEO under Josefsson, who has been bashed by the Swedish government recently for his public statements.

When it surfaced that Josefsson gave Germany guarantees for covering the expenses of a nuclear accident, Industry Minister Maud Olofsson blasted the CEO for overstepping his responsibilities.

Swedish union heads called on Josefsson to step down after media reports claimed that he had planned to sell the Swedish electricity grid to fund investments into the British nuclear energy sector.

But Josefsson on Monday strongly denied those reports.

"Vattenfall is currently not planning to invest in nuclear in the U.K.," he said in a conference call. "What you read in the press was a totally fabricated story."

Loeseth will nevertheless have to stop what clearly can be seen as a downward trend for Vattenfall.

People in Sweden and Germany have lost trust in the Stockholm-based company after a series of incidents at company-run nuclear reactors in both countries. Vattenfall had initially been slow to respond to those incidents.

"Vattenfall is in a crisis of confidence, I realize that, and we have to handle that here and now," Loeseth said, adding that he aims to start improving the trust at home and in Germany.

There, its 25-year-old Kruemmel reactor had to be shut down this summer after a transformer short-circuited. The plant had only been operating for a few weeks after it was taken off the grid for two years following a fire in another transformer.

Loeseth, who hails from Norway, in April 2008 became the CEO of Nuon, a company owned to 49 percent by Vattenfall. He has previously worked for Norwegian energy companies Statoil, Alliance Gas and Statkraft.

Vattenfall has 33,000 employees and is active in Scandinavia and mainland Europe. It has set itself a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2050.