Talk that the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company Limited (BOST) has released onto the Ghanaian market contaminated fuel is not entirely accurate, Alhassan Tampuli, Acting Chief Executive Officer of the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), has said.
BOST has been accused of releasing onto the Ghanaian market contaminated fuel, a development which many fear will damage engines of vehicles and other equipment that operate on fuel.
Accordingly, the Minority in Parliament has demanded the “immediate interdiction” of the Managing Director of BOST, Alfred Obeng Boateng, over a “bizarre” and “dubious” contract awarded to Movenpiina Company Limited to distribute the five million litres of contaminated oil onto the market.
At a press conference, the Minority called for a full-scale investigation by the regulatory authorities into the “corrupt” deal.
The Minority also demanded the “immediate withdrawal of the contaminated product from the market to protect consumers and assurances that this will not recur”.
The Minority also said the money lost due to the saga, which it estimated at GHS14.25million, must be retrieved by “surcharging the offending officials at BOST in line with the recent Supreme Court decision”.
Speaking on this development in an interview with Chief Jerry Forson, host of Ghana Yensom on Accra100.5FM on Wednesday June 28, Mr Tampuli said: “This product is good for some manufacturing companies. If you take it through some blending, you are able to sell it to those companies and they use it to run their factories, so it is not an entirely unusual transaction.
“What we want the public to know is that the fear that the product has ended up on the market is not well-grounded in fact, it is not.”
He added: “It is not an unusual thing to have service providers engaging in the business without licence. What happens is that when the NPA finds out, we go to operations and then we impose the necessary sanctions on those companies. That is what we do and so this case is not out of reality; it happens but we regularise them.
“On this occasion, Movenpiina and ZUPOIL had applied to us for regularisation of their licences but we needed to do so in accordance with the law.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
