Minister fires chief of energy fund
ENERGY Minister Tina JoematPettersson has fired the chairman of the Central Energy Fund (CEF), Xolani Mkhwanazi, for his role in the aborted attempt by the Strategic Fuel Fund (SFF) to acquire the South African assets of US oil company Chevron in June.
The CEF is the holding company of the SFF and is responsible for overseeing its affairs.
He is the third casualty of the Chevron bid, in which the fund made the unauthorised offer for the assets including a Cape Town refinery, Durban lubricants plant and the network of 845 Caltex retail fuel stations.
In July, the acting CEO of the SFF, Sibusiso Gamede and the chairman Riaz Jawoodeen resigned after the transaction came to light.
Mkhwanazi has a strong reputation in the private sector and serves on several boards including rail consortium Gibela, Murray & Roberts and South 32.
He could not be reached for comment on the claims made by the minister.
At the time, JoematPettersson — who is the shareholder minister of the CEF — asked Mkhwanazi and his board to conduct a probe of all the contracts of the fund since 2014, including the Chevron proposal and the sale of the country’s entire strategic fuel stock
in December 2015. But JoematPettersson now appears to believe that Mkhwanazi may have been complicit in some of the wrongdoing.
In a letter dated September 13h that Business Day has seen, she says Mkhwanazi’s “recent action of submitting an expression of interest to acquire a shareholding in Chevron SA despite my numerous instructions and unequivocal indicators that the state will not participate in the transaction … bears testimony of the contempt with which [my] bona fide instructions are treated.”
The minister says Mkhwanazi’s disregard for her office is substantial and “has the potential to disrupt and strain the relationship between the CEF group and shareholder”.
Her letter to Mkhwanazi makes no mention of the sale of strategic fuel stocksh that involved the disposal of 10million barrels of crude oil at prices well below market value and without Treasury permission. Gamede claimed at the time the disposal was, in fact, a “rotation”, although the ownership of oil has changed hands.
While several insiders confirmed the dismissal, neither Joemat-Pettersson nor the Department of the Energy were able to comment.
The facts about the sale of the stocks are yet to come to light. The transaction was done when the fund and the CEF had already closed operations for the year, raising the possibility that the boards of the entities did not approve the transaction.