No. 1 oil firm LUKoil has sold a large stake in second-tier television channel RenTV to national power giant Unified Energy Systems, a LUKoil official said.

The source in LUKoil management, who did not want to be identified, confirmed that a sale had taken place but would not reveal the size of the stake. He also refused to say how much UES had paid.

LUKoil had owned a 75 percent stake in RenTV.

RenTV was valued last year to be worth $30 million to $42 million by a Western investment company.

Officials at UES, which controls stakes in power subsidiaries across the nation, were coy Thursday about the sale.

"No documents registering the transaction have been registered," said UES spokesman Andrei Trapeznikov. "RenTV is making a film about our 80th anniversary. Representatives of the company often come to see me and I go to see them. And that’s all there is to it."

A member of the board of directors of a regional energy company said the buyer was one of UES’s subsidiaries.

Selling RenTV to UES means that LUKoil has given up one of its very few media assets.

"The deal really has been signed and the buyer was a UES structure," he said. "It purchased a controlling block rather than 75 percent."

RenTV was set up in 1991 as a production company and in 1997 began broadcasting.

RenTV’s programs reach all the big cities: St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, Saratov and Rostov-on-Don. Its potential viewers number some 70 million, and it broadcasts in a digital format.

Gallup Media puts RenTV’s share of the nation’s viewing public at 3.5 percent to 3.7 percent. In Moscow, RenTV is part of a cable network with 2.5 million subscribers (about 7.5 million viewers). Its share of the Moscow market is about 4.9 percent to 5.2 percent.

LUKoil has given up one of its very few media assets. The company owns Press-1, one of the nation’s largest publishing complexes and the printer of a number of newspapers including The Moscow Times.

LUKoil also has a major block of shares in the Izvestia newspaper.

Before the purchase, UES owned only the Energia Rossii paper. Its regional energy companies have shares in local papers, television companies and information agencies.

The sale left some observers baffled.

"I have no idea why UES would buy RenTV," said Sergei Vasilyev, general director of Video International’s media service.

"In terms of its capability for carrying advertising, the company is very unattractive. We don’t even include it in our market reports," Vasilyev said. "If Chubais needs to resolve PR tasks in the regions, then he needs to buy a station there."