The oil rip-off at Tema Oil Refinery

If there is anything that is heartbreaking and mind-boggling enough about the oil industry in Ghana today, as to be of great threat to the economy, it is definitely not the hue and cry over what became known as the ‘Sahara Deal,’ neither is it the imminent hike in fuel prices that is staring at Ghanaians in the face.

It is the slow, systematic but deliberate drain on the economy and siphoning of the tax-payers money into private pockets. The venue is the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), where Chronicle investigations have unveiled a racket that is actually stealing petroleum products that value some hundreds of millions of cedis daily.

This revelation is even more disheartening when one considers the efforts past and present governments have been making in a local oil exploration bid, vis-?-vis the fact that the heinous crime is committed in broad daytime under the noses of those who should care most- officials of TOR.

The core of the alarming story is that the whole of TOR’s parking lot, for tankers, and its immediate environs have now been turned into a full black market where several barrels of stolen petrol, diesel and other lubricants, obtained from the refinery, are sold out by tanker drivers to peddlers and other drivers in drums and buckets at reduced prices.

While the peddlers transport the drums of oil to their numerous sales-points, mostly in and around Tema Mankoadze round about and Ashaiman New Town, taxi and trotro drivers also take advantage of the low prices and troop to these black markets to get a piece of the action – cheap oil.

Weeks of investigations conducted by the Chronicle indicate that the core of the network is made up of some workers at the loading department, security staff and tanker drivers, though officials at the production and sale departments cannot be ruled out. The paper’s findings strongly suggest that tankers are loaded in excess at the depots with the connivance of some persons there who give under-invoiced papers to cover the loaded tankers.

On reaching the security points, the drivers, who have agents at the weighing section, are quickly passed out. The booty, which is sold right at the parking lot, is shared on a “one man no chop” or “di bi ma me n’di bi” basis.

A park of grassland interspersed with a few trees, which lies adjacent to the Vanef STC Bulk Supply Depot (Tema) and not too far from the Cocoa Processing Plant, can best be described as “the citadel of saboteurs,” where containers of various types and sizes are filled, kept under and the bushes and made ready for onward transmission to other illegal destinations.

Chronicle gathered from credible sources that on a good day, over a hundred tankers siphon off an average of five drums or barrels each through this practice, and this estimation has been corroborated by the fact that within an hour on a particular day, the Chronicle spotted over 20 tankers in action ‘fiili fiili’.

Another source hinted that even though loaded tankers are supposed to be sealed at the outlet valves with tags similar to what was used on the ballot boxes during the last elections before moving out of the refinery, some of the seals are not properly locked. Thus allowing them to sell the “booty before doing the actual sealing.

Apart from the huge cost of the crude oil and that of refining, which Ghana loses, the petrol tax, which should have gone with it is also lost. It is also likely to adversely affect the daily sales of filling stations in and around Tema due to the influx of those who patronise this black market.

What is however not clear to observers is whether TOR does not detect any shortfalls in their weekly or monthly revenue expectations, giving the benefit of the doubt that those in the network are ‘clever thieves.’ Only God knows what Ghana loses also through other means such as ‘Oil Bunkering.”