Sanction 'greedy' BOST director over sale of contaminated fuel – COPEC-GH

The Chamber of Petroleum Consumers, Ghana (COPEC-GH) is demanding the arrest and prosecution of any fuel station found to be selling the contaminated fuel on the market.

The Chamber contends that the terrible mess was as a result of BOST Managing Director’s “greed” making him act “recklessly” by allowing the contaminated fuel to be sold onto the market.

“One would have thought a company like BOST will at all times work with the public interest as the primary objective, but the selfish interests and greed of some management persons including the MD seem to have taken the best part in this cruel transaction without any proper prior or post sale and discharge impact assessment done” a Press release, by the Research, Pricing and Monitoring Officer at COPEC-GH, Mr Samson Addae said.

The group wants the regulatory authorities to penalize the BOST MD, his “cronies” and “other highly compromised management members” so as to “forestall any further dangerous recklessness.”

According to COPEC-GH, about 5million litres of the contaminated fuel have flooded the market and being sold at the pumps.

But, BOST in a statement issued has responded to the accusations.

The statement said:“BOST’s responsibility is to sell off-spec products to a qualified company and it is important to note that, off-spec products are used by the steel, garment, petro chemical companies to run their machinery and certainly not for the running of vehicle engines. It can also be used as mixture for asphalt and turpentine to prevent decay of wood, etc and therefore cannot fathom how possible off-spec products could be sold to unsuspecting consumers for whatever reason.

“That notwithstanding, it is a fact that, NPA is fully in control as usual and will not allow this to happen,” the company said.

The company insisted the sale was the best of three options.

“The first option is to have a corrective treatment of the off-spec product at TOR but this option was however not possible because TOR is not refining at the moment.

“The second option was to gradually inject a total of about seventy thousand (70,000) litres of the off-spec product into ten million litres (10,000,000) of normal product over a period which will take about ten (10) solid months for BOST to accomplish. The implication of this option is, however, the opportunity cost of losing the commercial value of over five million and seven hundred thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 5,700,000). This arrangement would have deprived the BDCs of getting space to store their products. The capacity of the tank holding the off-spec product is twenty million litres (20,000,000 lts).

“The third option involves the selling of the off-spec product at a competitive ex-depot price. Comparatively, the possible revenue loss here cannot outweigh the loss in Option 1 and 2.

“Clearly, OPTION 3 was the ideal from a business point of view,” the statement said.

The country is said to have lost about GHS 7 million in revenue following attempts by the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company Limited (BOST) to sell contaminated fuel to some oil marketing companies.

Documents sighted by Kasapafmonline.com indicate that BOST agreed to sell about GHc 5 million litres of the contaminated fuel to Movenpinna Energy.

The documents indicated that as at Wednesday, June 21st, 2017, BOST had agreed to sell off an estimated 186,000 litres of contaminated fuel to the oil company.