Six MDs in eight years weakened TOR – Managing Director

Frequent changes in leadership at the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) during the eight years of the previous administration undermined management stability and made it difficult to address the state-owned facility’s longstanding operational challenges, Managing Director Edmond Kombat has said.

Mr Kombat said TOR went through six managing directors and an interim management committee under former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, leaving successive management teams with limited time to implement decisions and deliver lasting improvements.

He argued that the frequent leadership changes, which occurred during a period when the refinery was not processing crude oil, contributed to uncertainty and weakened efforts to restore its operations.

Speaking in an interview on Channel One TV on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, Mr Kombat said turning around a refinery with complex technical and financial challenges required consistent leadership and a sustained management approach.

“In eight years, they had six managing directors, including an interim management committee. And an IMC of three personnel. So let’s say roughly seven MDs. You see that the turnover was very short,” he said.

“They were not refining, and I think they had an instability in leadership.”

Mr Kombat also identified the failure to produce independently audited financial statements over several years as a major weakness in TOR’s governance and management.

According to him, the absence of audited accounts made it difficult to establish a reliable picture of the refinery’s financial position and complicated the work of successive management teams.

“I think they didn’t really have a lot of time to make decisions. And then an audited account just piled up. It was a management account, not an independently audited account,” he said.

He disclosed that the current management had worked with the Ghana Audit Service to clear the backlog by auditing the refinery’s accounts for a seven-year period.

Management had also convened an annual general meeting to consider accounts covering the 2017 to 2025 financial years, he added.

Beyond leadership and accounting challenges, Mr Kombat said doubts about the refinery’s commercial viability within the previous administration had raised questions about its future.

He claimed that some officials at the Ministry of Energy had considered converting the facility into a tank farm or handing it over for alternative use instead of maintaining its refining operations.

“There are indications that some of the people in the government at the Energy Ministry didn’t really believe that TOR was viable. So there was this argument about either making it a tank farm or probably giving it out,” he said.

Mr Kombat, however, maintained that TOR remained a valuable national asset whose infrastructure and refining capacity should be considered in decisions about its future.

To illustrate the refinery’s strategic value, the Managing Director cited its storage capacity of one million metric tonnes, which he said was approximately three times that of the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company (BOST).

He also said TOR had the capacity to process 45,000 barrels of crude oil per stream day.

“If you have a refinery like this, the refinery of TOR, the storage is one million metric tons; it’s like three times that of BOST, and you have a refinery that is 45,000 capacity,” he said.

Mr Kombat said the priority for the current management was to consolidate TOR’s recovery and ensure that future leadership teams sustained the progress made.

He warned, in effect, that another cycle of frequent leadership changes could undermine efforts to restore the refinery and secure its long-term operational future.