By Brian Spottiswoode
Cape Town - In metric 10 of his analysis of Mr De Ruyter’s tenure as Eskom’s chief executive (Business Report, February 10), Siphelele Dludla stated that Eskom spent more than R5bn since November to purchase an additional 150 million litres of diesel from PetroSA.
This works out at over R33.3 per litre. Over this period, we motorists spent an average of about R23.3 per litre at the diesel pumps, of which (according to Outa) roughly R10 was for various levies, taxes, and sales costs.
This means that the diesel that we were buying for our cars will have had a wholesale price of about R13.3 per litre, and that Eskom paid R20 more per litre for fuel for their open cycle gas turbines.
For 150 million litres of fuel, it has to be concluded that Eskom might have paid as much as R3bn more than they should have!
It might be argued that the diesel as purchased needed some extra refining, but a kerosene alternative for their “open-cycle gas turbines” would also have cost about the same.
As this happened over a short period of just three months, it should not be an overly complicated exercise for the full payment trail to be investigated.
Let’s hope that the president’s state of disaster will be used to open, rather than impede, the way for a body such as the Hawks to investigate this issue, including the participation of PetroSA.
Cape Times
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