Kubayi’s suspension of CEF board seeks to protect the real culprits
1 August 2017
The decision by the Energy Minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi, to suspend the entire Central Energy Fund (CEF) board, including the acting CEO and CFO, is highly confusing and may be nothing more than a smoke screen.
It is confusing in the sense that the current CEF board became aware of the sale only in May 2016 and the CEF Chairperson and the two other board members, Mosimaneotsile Besnaar and Mr Neville Mompati, were only appointed in December 2016, well after the issues of the sale which occurred in December 2015.
Removing a new chairperson who is actively trying to clean up the fund and PetroSA is also highly suspicious. The firing of these board members is highly irregular and seems politically motivated – it has nothing to do with the board’s performance.
What the Minister has done is a significant U-turn from two months ago and her opinion is based on an audit report she presented to the Portfolio Committee on Energy that said the CEF board was not complicit in the secret sale of 10.3 million barrels of the country’s strategic oil reserves at alarmingly low prices. Minister Kubayi has admitted that this was not ‘a rotation of stock’ as former Energy Minister, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, had claimed.