Managing Director of TOR, Edmond Kombat.
Frequent changes at the top of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) during the eight years of the previous administration undermined management stability and made it difficult to address the facility’s deep-rooted operational problems, the refinery’s Managing Director, Edmond Kombat, has said.
He said the refinery went through six managing directors and an interim management committee under former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, leaving successive management teams with limited time to implement decisions and deliver lasting improvements.
Mr Kombat said the repeated changes, at a time when TOR was not refining crude oil, contributed to the uncertainty that affected the state-owned facility.
In an interview on Wednesday, November 11, he argued that turning around a refinery with complex technical and financial challenges required consistent leadership and a sustained management approach.
“In eight years, they had six managing directors, including an interim management committee. And an IMC of three personnel. So let’s say roughly seven MDs. You see that the turnover was very short,” he said on Channel One TV.
“They were not refining, and I think they had an instability in leadership.”
Mr Kombat also identified the failure to produce independently audited financial statements over several years as a major weakness in the refinery’s governance and management.
He said the absence of audited accounts made it difficult to establish a clear picture of the company’s financial position and compounded the challenges facing successive management teams.
“I think they didn’t really have a lot of time to make decisions. And then an audited account just piled up. It was a management account, not an independently audited account,” he said.
He disclosed that the current management had worked with the Ghana Audit Service to clear the backlog, auditing the refinery’s accounts for the seven-year period.
The management had also convened an annual general meeting to consider the accounts covering 2017 to 2025, he added.
Beyond the management and accounting challenges, Mr Kombat said doubts about TOR’s commercial viability within the previous administration had also raised questions about the future of the refinery.
He said some officials at the Ministry of Energy had reportedly considered converting the facility into a tank farm or handing it over for alternative use rather than maintaining its refining operations.
“There are indications that some of the people in the government at the Energy Ministry didn’t really believe that TOR was viable. So there was this argument about either making it a tank farm or probably giving it out,” he said.
Mr Kombat, however, maintained that TOR remained a valuable national asset whose capacity should not be overlooked in discussions about its future.
He cited its storage capacity of one million metric tonnes, which he said was about three times that of the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company (BOST), as well as its ability to process 45,000 barrels of crude oil per stream day.
“If you have a refinery like this, the refinery of TOR, the storage is one million metric tons; it’s like three times that of BOST, and you have a refinery that is 45,000 capacity,” he said.
He said the task before the current management was to consolidate the refinery’s recovery and ensure that subsequent leadership teams maintained the gains rather than allowing another cycle of instability to derail its progress.
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