Why Sumayya was pushed out of Nock

National Oil Chief Executive Officer, Sumayya Hassan-Athmani. She was recently reinstated after the intervention of Deputy President William Ruto.

The exit package of National Oil Corporation of Kenya (Nock) boss Sumayya Hassan-Athmani was negotiated by the Ministry of Energy.

Ms Athmani told The Standard she had left under her own terms several months after she survived a boardroom war that saw her temporarily suspended. But she declined to reveal how much her exit package was.

“I am going on terminal leave. Usually one is required to do so in the last six months before end of term but I have decided to combine my normal leave with the terminal leave,” she said in a telephone interview.

But an insider says Ms Athmani has been paid off to retire in a deal negotiated by the ministry. Her term was set to expire in March 2017 and this means that she left eight months early. The source said the package was “decent”.

The oil marketer said on Monday it had appointed Ms MaryJane Mwangi as the acting chief executive. Ms Mwangi is the general manager for downstream operations.

Athmani has been fighting several battles at the State-owned parastatal that were made worse by a boardroom war that saw her temporarily suspended in January. But she was reinstated 27 days later after a public outcry.

Jetty project

She had been accused of blocking investigations into the corporation’s operations over an alleged Sh270 million loss the organisation made in the first half of the current financial year. This was made worse by tribalism and corruption allegations that saw the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) begin investigations.

A resolution to push her out of office was made after a board meeting in Naivasha last year when she fell out with a section of board members over “interests”. An insider told this paper in an earlier interview that Athmani was being fought partly in the boardroom on how to handle deals of over Sh75 billion that the agency was expected to hand over. The new Energy minister has also been replacing heads of strategic parastatals in his docket. One of the main points of contention is the Sh50 billion jetty project, which the ministry has been plotting to wrest from Nock on grounds of implementation capacity.

Several Government policy documents, including those presented to Parliament recently, show that Nock was the implementing authority of the $500 million jetty but the ministry recently took this off Nock quietly. The jetty, expected to make it possible to offload fuel imports from the high seas, is among the three projects valued at over Sh75 billion that are behind the boardroom war at Nock.

Other projects are the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) project estimated to cost in excess of Sh14.5 billion and another Sh12 billion worth of Government fuel business a year. The LPG project will see Nock import at least three million gas cylinders.

But it is the Sh12 billion worth of Government fuel business every year following a State House directive that was the last straw for Sumayya. This was after the Government directed all ministries and agencies to buy fuel lubricants and bitumen exclusively from Nock mid-last year.