Vice President of IMANI Ghana, Bright Simons, says the TOR-Torrentco partnership is merely borne out of strategic incompetence.

According to him, the management of the Tema Oil Refinery have demonstrated no interest whatsoever in solving the issues that bedevil the refinery.

He stressed that should the agitations of civil society go unheard concerning the unviability of the TOR-Torrentco partnership, it might just be the final nail in TOR’s coffin.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said;

“It is borne out of strategic incompetence. You have a problem, you solve the problem.  So you have a problem with obsolete equipment, you have a problem with working capital needs, you have a problem where fundamentally you make losses because you’re not set up right, you introduce a solution that addresses those problems.

“And the first solution is that you clear the debt using the taxes that have been paid to clear the debt. Once you clear the debt, you do an open competitive process to bring the best investors with the most capacity to come on board. You don’t go and do a secret deal, nobody is aware of this, everything is negotiated in darkness, then you send it to the public procurement authority to go and ratify it as a single sourcing arrangement.

“And then once that has been decided, it gets leaked to us and only then are we finding out. So you don’t approach these things in the manner in which they’ve been approached if your real goal is to solve the problem and to solve the problem fundamentally.”

He had earlier raised concerns about the viability of the partnership.

According to him, TOR will be shortchanged should the partnership not be called off and the resulting effect would be that the refinery will become unviable for the long term.

Explaining his point he said;

“All the facts suggest TOR needs a huge amount of money to transform itself. We as citizens have paid more than a billion dollars in special taxes purely for TOR to reform itself. Essentially, the government has taxed us more than a billion dollars over the last ten years or so to give to TOR for TOR to transform itself. And that has not been done.

“So to try and get in an investor who is only committing to get in only $22million for capital investment and refurbishment, and to pay you roughly $13million a year in rent when your last major capital investment was $230million to fix the secondary plants which is called the RCC tells you that this is completely disorganized.

“Because if $230million was not enough, and that was just a partial renovation, how will $22million make any difference? And then secondly if you were earning $2.5 per barrel and it was not sufficient and you kept making massive losses, how will earning $1.5 per barrel make a difference?

“TOR owes a lot of money, every month, the interest rates compound. If TOR doesn’t get the amount of money it deserves in order to pay off these debts, by the time the lease is over in six years, the debt of TOR will double. It’s currently nearly $450million, so in Ghanaian cedis it is over ₵5billion.

“A company that owes that amount of money cannot allow that to double while it’s taking small amounts of money just to keep going for six years. By the time six years is over, refinery over capacity worldwide would create conditions in which the losses would keep compounding and TOR would be unviable for the long term.”