Here comes Eskom’s axeman
As controversy rages about his appointment, new Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter is expected to trim the power utility’s bloated workforce as it struggles to keep the lights on – and his history suggests he will do just that, says an expert.
The selection of Andre de Ruyter as Eskom’s CEO was slammed yesterday by a risk management expert who called it an “astoundingly inappropriate appointment”.
“He was a nightmare at Sasol,” Bart Henderson of Stadler Group said.
“He made CEO David Constable’s life a living hell by subverting the board. He can take a giant share of the blame for the catastrophe that is Lake Charles, not to mention creative reporting and other nasty tendencies.”
Lake Charles in Louisiana is Sasol’s biggest loss since its inception under De Ruyter in 2011, and later taken over by Constable.
Consisting of two gas-to-liquid plants, the scheme was estimated to have cost around R277 billion in 2013.
In August, Business Day reported earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) were expected to be within a range of $150m (R2.2 billion) and $300m in the year to end-June 2020, down from a previous forecast of $300m to $350m.
“Sasol has been grappling with major cost overruns at the Louisiana project, saying in July it had written down its assets in North America and Africa by R18.1 billion,”
Business Day reported.
The news from Nampak was also bad, having lost more than 80% of its value over the past five years. It lost another 1.63% yesterday. According to Daily Maverick, a year after De Ruyter joined Nampak the oil price went into free-fall, “which all but collapsed the economies of Angola and Nigeria – where Nampak had just built two big manufacturing plants”.