Vice President of IMANI Ghana, Bright Simons, says the senior management of the Tema Oil Refinery’s support for the TOR-Torrentco partnership should not be heeded to.

According to him, their managerial track record is testament to their poor management skills and their cluelessness in relation to saving TOR from imminent collapse.

“I don’t think what TOR says should give us a certain level of confidence because this is the same organsiation that run itself into a ditch for many many years. If they knew what they had to do as TOR and as currently constituted they wouldn’t be in the ditch they’re in. So what TOR tells us is good for TOR is not something that we should pay a lot of attention to,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express.

He was reacting to a statement from the senior staff union of TOR who claimed opponents to the TOR-Torrentco partnership are “either being ignorant about the real facts or being sponsored by adversaries of the refinery to keep the refinery in its current near helpless state for their wicked and selfish interest.”

They argued that the proposed partnership would help revamp and reposition TOR – which has buckled under huge overhang debts, huge indebtedness to utility companies, product accounting challenges among many others – to effectively deliver on its core mandate and related businesses in a sustainable manner.

However, Bright Simons and other civil society organisations think otherwise.

 “This is the same organization whose supervising minister claims they’ve been stealing their products. Recently he set up an interim management committee and issued press releases suggesting that a lot of the products produced at TOR are being stolen.”

According to Mr. Simons, the statement by the senior staff union should not be considered as it lacks any objectivity whatsoever.

“We’ve seen the statement by the senior management at TOR, but these are the same people that have been accused of running the refinery into a ditch. So what we’re interested in is what is the objective person going to say if you look at all the facts?

“And 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,” he said.

Further rubbishing the viability of the TOR-Torrentco partnership, he said;

“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?”