How staff of TOR gave up their salaries to help restructure the company - Awuah-Darko reveals

Former Managing Director of Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), Kwame Awuah-Darko has revealed how the staff of the organization gave up their salaries to ensure that the company restructured to make it better.

He made this known when he spoke in an interview with Bernard Avle on Accra-based Citi TV.

The man who was highly tipped for the Vice Presidential spot in the National Democratic Congress (NDC) said when he was made the Managing Director of Tema Oil Refinery, the company had to go through a restructuring process to fine-tune activities at the place because things were really bad.

Awuah-Darko said “When I got to TOR, we had two refinery activities going on: the tank farm had overgrown and you had snakes, stray dogs and stray cats. If you sent a worker to go to the tank farm, they would refuse to go. We could not pay for electricity and our lights were going off all the time. Things were so bad that the workers gave up their salaries for two months to enable us to put the company’s finances in a short term together”.

Touting some achievements TOR made under his leadership, he said “That is the TOR I met. The TOR I left had gone from 25,000 barrels a day to 45,000. We had restructured 250 million out of the 650 million that I went to meet. We had started processing crude oil.”

Kwame Awuah-Darko was Managing Director of Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) and also doubled as the Managing Director of the Bulk Oil Storage Transportation Company Limited (BOST) but he indicated that the work at TOR was done on a probono basis because he never took salary but got paid only for the work did at BOST.