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There Is Nothing Like Dr. K.K. Sarpong In Control. From all indications, the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), one of the nation�s most strategic corporate assets, which has been on life-support is having some new lease of life being injected into it. The new Chief Executive, Dr. Kwame Ampofo, in collaboration with the reconstituted Board of Directors and the Workers� Union, have made some drastic changes to rejuvenate the Refinery. The Ghanaian Democratic intelligence scouts have learnt from sources close to the Refinery that a directive went out last Monday, 16 November 2009, to effect changes in the leadership of the various departments of the Refinery. The changes, which were to take effect from Wednesday, 18 November 2009, would lead to the rotation of heads of departments. Our sources claim that changes, which were preceded by far reaching reviews of some sloppy credit control policies instituted under the NPP that contributed to the huge indebtedness of the Refinery, have started to have beneficial effects on the precarious financial position of the Refinery. Our sources explained that one of such unproductive mechanisms allowed Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) to lift oil products to the tune of one and a half times the value of bank guarantees they posted based on directives from the Castle. This led to huge debts owed to TOR in excess of eleven billion Ghana Cedis. The OMCs can now lift products only to the tune of the value of the guarantee they post. �To check the anomalies, the Refinery in collaboration with Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) and National Petroleum Authority (NPA) has come to a consensus that any OMC that owes any one of them bodies owes all of them and will not be entertained by any of them, since owing one of them amounts to affects the whole sector. TOR has also decided to cut supplies to all indebted OMCs until they settle their bills�, the sources said. �This explains the shortage of refined products in parts of the country. The OMCs could not get supplies because they were cut off for indebtedness�, the sources added. They believed that the new rule would discourage companies from defaulting in payments to any to the three organizations and these restrictions would ensure sanity in the petroleum Industry, as well as prevent any fuel crisis since indebtedness had continued to be the only source of petroleum crisis in the country. Continuing, they indicated that one of the infamous strategies of the NPP in the oil industry was that cronies of powerful politicians in the Party own most of the OMCs in the country. As a result instructions came from Castle, which made it impossible for TOR management to turn them down, thereby making the Presidency the de facto manager that ran the Refinery into crippling indebtedness. With the new initiative of consultative meetings representatives of TOR, NPA, GNPC, the bulk trading companies and the OMCs sit around the same table to make rules for the industry, making it difficult for any of them to flout them. Turning to the importation of crude oil which was recently a topical issue, our sources indicated that the Refinery is currently buying oil on the spot market from private oil supplying companies until the government-to-government negotiations take effect. �For instance, Sahara Oil supplied some 997,000 barrels, which are being refined. The Refinery will also receive another million barrels of a type of crude oil called ERHA from Nigeria. This has never been refined at TOR before, but has been found to be compatible with the equipment at the Refinery. These are to help meet the demand of consumption in the country and ECOBANK has established all the Letters of Credit covering them.� According to our sources, personnel changes so far reported are at the Credit Control, Quality Control, RFCC Plant, Environment, Distribution, and Procurement departments. They indicated that although the new changes seem to be just the shuffling of the same people around, they are meant to put people in places where they would be more effective. For this reason, even though the changes did not look dramatic, their net effect would be like making new appointments altogether. They hinted that from all indications more changes were likely to be made soon, and were expected to affect the top managers some of whom were perceived to have consciously or unconsciously contributed to the plummeting standards and image of TOR. Readers may recall that the Ghanaian Democrat newspaper embarked upon incessant reports early this year calling for reshuffle at the Refinery, soon after the people of Ghana ousted the NPP from power. It was not long after these reports that Dr. K.K. Sarpong was removed from the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Refinery. However, many journalists believed that his removal was not the actual solution to the problems of TOR. They sought, rather hastily, to call Dr. Ampofo�s competence into question. This was quite unfortunate because these journalists did not have access to vital information about the industry. Most of their reports emanated from synopsis of information, a lot of which was inaccurate and therefore demonized certain individuals. Rather, it was the slack and corrupt institutional mechanism designed and put in place by the previous NPP government that had to be rooted out. In this case, the problems of TOR were personalized and mostly with the former CEO without delving into the source of the problems, which was how Ex-President Kufuor and his henchmen tried to run down almost all the state-owned industries as a prelude to acquiring them through front men. Evidence abounds in the sale of Ashanti Gold, Ghana Telecom, Quality Grain, the collapse of Ghana Airways, the attempted collapse and sale of Agricultural Development Bank and many others. Clearly, these examples lend credence to the accusation that it was the obnoxious policy of the Kufuor�s administration to run down state-owned enterprises including TOR through designed mechanisms. For this reason, CEOs of these companies were just tools working in accordance with the plan that was drawn up for them. In a nut-shell, they were just scapegoats, but some of us in the press sensationalized the role of heads of departments without hitting the real source of the problems. One media report went to the extent of claiming that even though Dr. Kwame Ampofo was officially the CEO of the Refinery, his predecessor, Dr. K.K Sarpong, was the de facto CEO, who was controlling affairs from behind the scenes through proxies who had been put in sensitive positions. It explained that there were some ten General Managers at TOR and seven of them were NPP apparatchiks who fed Dr. Sarpong with information, took instructions from him and repackaged them to Dr. Ampofo, who used them. However, the changes the new administration has affected, experts who have studied the NPP mechanism put in place agree, will completely neutralize everything that would sabotage the NDC government, even if Ex-President Kufuor were the new MD at TOR. The problems were purely institutional lapses that can be monitored and corrected or redesigned to enable TOR to operate efficiently for the benefit of the nation as a whole. It was rather unfortunate that without making careful analysis and accurately reporting on the situation, the continuity of negative reports would not give TOR any good image and would make it difficult for any bank to deal with it. This is because banks would doubt its credibility even with significant changes in management and governance. The good news is that Dr. Kwame Ampofo, under the able direction of the Board of Directors, is on top of issues, as the Refinery has for the past few weeks been busy refining oil to ensure that no fuel crisis occurs in the country.