The current management of Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company Limited (BOST) has serviced the entire debt of the company, ushering a new lease of life to the once-struggling state-owned enterprise.
The managing director of BOST Edwin Provencal said the company’s current management has cleared all the monies it owed due to years of mismanagement.
When the new management of BOST came in 2017, they met a trade liability of US$624 million for products bought that had not been paid for. They also met a legacy debt of GH¢416million hanging around the organisation’s neck as well as some US$ 37 million claims by some Bulk Oil Distributing Companies (BDCs), he said.
“I am proud to say that as of today, we have paid off almost 98% of the US$624 million of our trade liability debt. Out of that 98% of the money paid, 70% was paid through BOST’s internally generated fund and the government helped us with the other 30% through the ESLA bonds. So, we have paid off that money and it’s left with 2-3% of that money to pay,” Provencal said on the #PatrioticSpaces on Twitter hosted by Kow Essuman, counsel to President Nana Akufo-Addo.
“For the GHC416 million legacy debt, we have paid 100%. And for the US$37 million BDC claim, after a forensic audit, the claimants said we owed them only US$11 million, saving this company and this country US$26 million that was in our books as a liability to these companies,” he said.
Provencal said this was thanks to prudent management and aggressive efforts to fix, restore and repair all the company’s non-performing equipment to 100% operating capacity.
“We also didn’t have good brand image out there because of our past,” the MD said. “So, we have to ensure that we rebranded ourselves, build a great corporate culture based on performance. Nothing else.”
BOST can now boast of profits after tax and operational cost after five years of religiously implementing the MD’s five-year transformational plan. After 11 years of recording losses, the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company Limited made a remarkable turnaround, recording GHC168.8 million profit after tax last year.
