In May last year, two oil tankers set sail for South Africa, each carrying $35-million (R650-million) worth of diesel.
Their destination: Mossel Bay, where the diesel could potentially be piped into Eskom’s open cycle gas turbines and burned to keep loadshedding at bay.
When the tankers arrived, however – Jag Pushpa on 11 May and Centennial Matsuyama on 16 May – they found there was no room at the inn: PetroSA’s storage tanks were full.
With demurrage costs increasing at $35 000 (R650 000) a day, PetroSA “scanned the market” looking for a buyer and settled on a little-known company, Nako Energy, who offered to buy the diesel at a hefty discount.
Nako didn’t qualify for credit and PetroSA would make a R19-million loss, but hey, this was an emergency.
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This, at least, is the story that PetroSA employees concocted in an internal memo in a bid to explain why they handed over R933-million worth of diesel without Nako paying for it or providing payment guarantees.
The memo was compiled in August 2024, a month before Nako was due to make full and final payment for the diesel. Almost a year later, however, Nako still owed PetroSA R825-million.
PetroSA declined to comment: “PetroSA has considered the questions provided and will not be providing any commentary in this regard,” spokesperson Nonny Mashika-Dennison told us.
Nako’s CEO, Nqobani Mkhwanazi, was more forthcoming: “PetroSA approached Nako to urgently assist in offloading diesel cargoes under significant time pressure … Nako stepped in at PetroSA’s request,” she told us in a written response.
But even she conceded that the deal was irregular.
“No guarantees were provided for these cargoes by any financial institution,” Mkhwanazi confirmed in a follow-up response.
As for a written contract governing the almost R1-billion sale? “To our knowledge, no such agreement exists,” she said.
Yet the evidence suggests is that the Nako deal – with its hefty discounts and missing paperwork – is just the tip of the iceberg: PetroSA has been gambling recklessly in its diesel trading business and hiding its losses behind claims of commercial secrecy.
A secret business
As the state-owned petroleum company, PetroSA’s role is to ensure that the country has access to petrol and diesel.
Historically that meant refining, but since 2020, when its Mossel Bay refinery closed, PetroSA’s only real business has been trading fuel. And although it is technically insolvent, PetroSA has been kept afloat largely by one client: Eskom.
Thanks to loadshedding, which has created an unslakable thirst for diesel, PetroSA’s revenue grew from R11-billion in 2019 to R23-billion in 2024. Figures provided by Eskom show that at the height of loadshedding, 80% of Eskom’s diesel was supplied by PetroSA.
This covert bailout – funded by Eskom and electricity users – may have injected as much as R500-million into PetroSA in the last financial year.
This wouldn’t have happened if the Department of Minerals and Petroleum had granted Eskom a fuel wholesale licence, but it refused, arguing that Eskom did not qualify as a wholesaler. Without a wholesale licence, Eskom cannot apply for a diesel import licence and is forced to buy from importers like PetroSA.
This comes at a premium: another internal memo from March this year shows PetroSA discussing how it would make a profit of between R29-million to R50-million on a cargo of diesel sold to Eskom, while noting that it would barely break if it sold the same cargo to the oil industry.
That doesn’t mean that PetroSA is charging Eskom more than the oil majors – in fact, Eskom told us that PetroSA offered it the best discount on the market. But what it does show is how costly PetroSA’s role as an unnecessary middleman to Eskom has become.
Worryingly, PetroSA’s booming fuel trading business has also ushered in an era of extreme secrecy. And despite being a major public entity PetroSA refuses to publish its annual report or disclose the names of the companies that supplied it with diesel and profited from these contracts.
The details that leak out – like the Nako deal – show why.
A mad strategy
It’s hard to understand just how bad the Nako deal was without understanding what should have happened had this been a normal transaction.
To start with, PetroSA should never have ordered R1.3-billion worth of diesel if it knew it didn’t have space in its storage tanks in Mossel Bay.
However, buoyed by the loadshedding crisis – the money it stood to make from Eskom – PetroSA had adopted a “supply-led” strategy of ordering tankers of diesel without necessarily having a buyer, storage or funding lined up.
Vusi Xaba, PetroSA’s then head of trading, recently told us that “there was a task to bring in 3.5-billion litres per annum. So as trading your job is to bring in minimum five vessels a month… It was the corporate strategy of PetroSA, to remain afloat.”
This gamble, however, also meant that PetroSA was caught out when loadshedding dramatically dipped.
In October 2023, with multiple oil tankers queued up in Mossel Bay, PetroSA told journalists that the tankers were being used as temporary storage to ensure diesel was available for Eskom’s Open Cycle Gas Turbine.
This is, to put it bluntly, a mad strategy.
Firstly, PetroSA has storage tanks in Mossel Bay and Eskom has additional storage tanks at the Gourikwa power station, so the supply of diesel can be managed without the need for queuing ships.
Secondly, when an oil tanker has to wait to discharge, the clock starts running on demurrage fees, which for an oil tanker are typically $35 0000 (R650 000) a day.
Between 2023 and 2024, PetroSA’s demurrage bill skyrocketed from R34-million to R389-million – an elevenfold increase thanks to the supply-led strategy.
Eskom was quite clear that it does not pay these demurrage fees, adding that it had never asked PetroSA to keep tankers waiting as a way to avoid loadshedding.
Instead, these costs hit PetroSA’s bottom line: its 2024 financials, which it refuses to make public, show that even as PetroSA sold more fuel at a bigger profit, its ballooning demurrage bill wiped out any gains.
In 2024, rather than making more money, PetroSA’s operating losses actually increased from R1.5-billion to R1.7-billion.
The strategy – approved by PetroSA’s all-powerful chair Nkuleleko Poya and implemented by Xaba’s team – was so nonsensical that there was widespread speculation someone was getting kickbacks for every tanker ordered, although no evidence has emerged to support this claim.
Poya didn’t respond to calls or emails, but Xaba told us that he was aware of these rumours and underwent a polygraph test in a bid to disprove them.
The ambitious diesel-buying strategy was partly about ensuring security of supply for the country, he said, but added that “from time to time, we as trading pushed back”.
When Xolile Sizani was appointed as the new CEO of PetroSA in April 2024, he committed to curb the “excessive demurrage costs” by implementing a more rational diesel-buying strategy, according to the annual report.
By this point, however, two more cargoes of diesel had already slipped through.
A traffic jam in Mossel Bay
By April 2024, loadshedding was in remission. Unperturbed, PetroSA’s trading team had placed an order with Swiss commodities trader Gunvor for 100-million litres of diesel.
Shipping records show that there were already three vessels in Mossel Bay waiting to discharge: Daytona, carrying 50-million litres of unleaded petrol, had arrived on 1 March; Sti Aqua and Nord Victorious, each carrying 50-million litres of diesel, had arrived in mid-April.
PetroSA had managed to postpone two more cargoes of diesel that had been scheduled to arrive in April, but Gunvor refused, saying that its fuel had already been loaded.
When Gunvor’s two vessels arrived in May – Jag Pushpa from the Mangalore refinery in India and Centennial Matsuyama from the Fujairah refinery in the UAE – they joined the growing queue of oil tankers.
With no demand from Eskom and no way of offloading the diesel in Mossel Bay, PetroSA’s trading team began looking around for another buyer.
South Africa is a net importer of diesel so any of the major fuel suppliers – Total, Engen, Shell – would be potential buyers. Instead, they settled on a company that seemed to have an inside track at PetroSA.
Enter Nako
Nako Energy is virtually unknown outside of PetroSA. Established in 2022, the company’s founder, Nkosinathi Ngwenya, comes from the mining industry, while its CEO Nqobani Mkhwanazi has a background in finance.
In just two years, however, Nako had become a favoured partner of PetroSA.
In January 2023 it was one of the bidders for the gas-to-liquids refinery in Mossel Bay. It lost out to Russia’s Gazprombank but instead secured a three-year contract to supply unleaded petrol.
“Nako is one of the very few independent black-owned traders that have consistently delivered in this space, while others have exited or failed,” Mkhwanazi told us.
Internal records list at least five cargoes – together worth R3.5-billion – bought from or sold to PetroSA in the space of a year. As we shall see in part 2 of our Dirty Fuels investigation, however, these have not been without catastrophic fallout for PetroSA.
No contract, no guarantees
When PetroSA agreed to sell the two cargoes of diesel, it did so on the understanding that Nako would provide guarantees. This is standard in any fuel transaction and normally the guarantees would need to be in place before the vessel even puts to sea.
According to the memo concocted by PetroSA’s trading team, the guarantees Nako provided came from two boutique asset management companies in Cape Town: Taquanta Asset Management and Khumo Capital.
Asset management companies are not normally in the business of providing guarantees for billion-rand cargoes of diesel, and almost immediately there were issues: “PetroSA’s finance department reviewed these guarantees and consulted with Debtsure, which advised against granting credit based on these guarantees,” the trading team wrote.
When we put this to Taquanta’s chief investment officer, Raphael Nkomo, he baulked.
Nkomo told us that his firm was interested in funding the Nako transaction when it was presented to him by Ngwenya, the Nako founder and shareholder. On 17 June 2024, he issued a provisional payment undertaking – not a guarantee – for R500-million.
Within days, however, he had retracted the offer because Nako had been unable to produce a valid contract with PetroSA.
“We needed a valid contract,” Nkomo explained. “Three days later, no contract was produced. We pleaded with them for a contract so we could take it to the credit committee. On 20 June we issued a retraction to that letter.”
Nkomo provided us with letters and emails from PetroSA to show that Taquanta had retracted the offer. Mkhwanazi reiterated this, saying that “it is important to place on record that PetroSA never declined or rejected Taquanta’s payment undertaking”.
Still, we asked Nkomo why he had retracted his letter so quickly, waiting just three days to pull the plug. He told us: “I did not see any material whatsoever that could allow me to put pensioners’ money at risk … I asked once, twice, three times – when it isn’t forthcoming I retract.”
The letter had seemingly served its purpose though: a day after it was received, the Jag Pushpa set sail for Nako’s storage tanks in Durban. By the time it arrived, the letter had been withdrawn.
According to the memo, a second guarantee had supposedly come from “Khumo”, which is likely a reference to Khumo Capital, where Mkhwanazi works as the managing partner of the unlisted property fund (in addition to her position as CEO of Nako Energy).
However, Khumo’s lead of governance, Glenville Retief, told us: “We do not provide, and have never provided, guarantees for any clients. Khumo does not have, and has never had, a business relationship with Nako Energy … or PetroSA.”
Mkhwanazi told us that ultimately: “No guarantees were provided for these cargoes by any financial institution.”
Guarantees, she explained, require a valid contract. “To our knowledge, no such agreement exists”.
A R106-million discount
Regardless of when or why the funders withdrew, when the Jag Pushpa arrived in Durban on 21 June Nako had no contract and no guarantees in place that would allow it to take possession of 50 million litres of PetroSA’s fuel.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to remember that these are assets owned by the state. It’s a bit like deciding to sell Orlando Stadium without a tender and being asked to hand it over with no contract and no guarantee you’ll be paid.
PetroSA had already decided to keep the second cargo – from the Centennial Matsuyama – and sell it locally, leaving just the Jag Pushpa and its R650-million cargo on the table.
However, with no evidence that Nako could pay for the fuel, PetroSA was well within its rights to cancel the deal and look for a serious buyer. Instead, PetroSA agreed to give Nako further discounts.
“Due to evolving market conditions, Nako Energy requested amendments including a revised pricing structure, adjusted payment terms, and immediate cargo discharge to secure the berthing slot,” the PetroSA trading team wrote in the August memo.
It’s unclear what price Nako had originally offered to pay, but now Nako told PetroSA it wanted to pay less: “Nako reverted with a request for an increased discount of [R2.10/litre], this was at the back of engagements and negotiations with their customers.”
With just over 50 million litres of diesel on board, Nako was asking for a R106-million discount.
A R19-million loss
At this point, PetroSA claims that it “scanned the market to check if there were any other interested parties”.
Again, any of the major oil companies would have been potential buyers. Instead, PetroSA picked another unknown company.
Skyeline Oil & Gas had only been registered for a month, so it’s unclear how PetroSA found Skyeline, but the company confirmed that it had entered into negotiations with PetroSA to buy the R650-million cargo of diesel.
“The discussion fell through due to lack of alignment on the price,” the trading team wrote.
PetroSA then went back to Nako and agreed to sell the diesel at a R1.90/litre discount from the wholesale price.
Mkhwanazi told us that the R1.90/litre (R96-million) discount was market-related. Major oil companies, she told us, were offering discounts of up to R1.80/litre at the time. “[A]n extra 10 cents is a good incentive. By no means is it preferential,” she added.
PetroSA – whose entire profit margin had already been eaten up by demurrage and falling fuel prices – would take a hit of 40c/litre and ultimately make a loss of R19-million, according to the memo.
Mkhwanazi, however, maintains that the alternative was worse: “You … reference a R19-million loss on the cargo without considering the extent of losses PetroSA might have faced had Nako not stepped in to assist with the offload … PetroSA would have been left in an even more precarious position given the declining domestic fuel price, lack of committed offtake, no storage capacity, and an environment of reduced demand due to load shedding—all of which would have necessitated a distressed sale,” she said.
When the trading team asked senior executives to sign off on the sale a month later, they made a similar argument: “Remaining in Mossel Bay would have resulted in a total demurrage of R64.8-milion. Therefore, the sales results in cost containment / avoidance to the value of R39.5-million for the company,” they wrote.
This, of course, is a false dilemma, but if the trading team approached any other credible buyers to take the Jag Pushpa’s cargo, they didn’t mention it in the memo.
Taxes, penalties and irregular credit
By July, the Jag Pushpa was ready to discharge but Nako still wasn’t ready with its funding, so PetroSA begrudgingly agreed to act as the official importer.
This meant that PetroSA would be liable for another R306-million in duties owed to SARS. According to an internal PetroSA document, Nako promised it would settle the duties by 12 July.
When Nako failed to pay, SARS hit PetroSA with another R30-million in penalties.
“Nako Energy was put on notice for all penalties and interest payable to SARS resulting from late payment,” the trading team wrote in the August 2024 memo. (We asked Nako a series of follow-up questions on the money owed to SARS, but they declined to say anything more.)
The risk was that 50 million litres of PetroSA’s diesel was now sitting in Nako’s storage tanks in Durban.
Nako still hadn’t paid for the fuel or delivered a guarantee, so PetroSA kept a holding certificate over the fuel, meaning it couldn’t be sold without “the green light from PetroSA”.
In August, then-CEO Xolile Sizani and CFO Nombulelo Tyandela were asked to “approve credit to the value of R933.4-million to Nako with no credible guarantee”.
The memo is ambiguous about whether this meant that Nako was now free to take the fuel or whether PetroSA still expected a guarantee before the holding certificate would be lifted.
PetroSA declined to comment and Sizani, who is on suspension, could not be reached for comment, but a source within PetroSA told us that the idea was that the holding certificate would only be lifted once Nako had delivered a guarantee.
The trading team had been keeping up the pretence that a guarantee was still coming. In the August 2024 memo, they told executives that Nako was working on “a contingency plan in case the guarantees from Taquanta and Khumo were not approved”.
Yet as far as we have been able to establish, there were never any guarantees from Taquanta or Khumo and the provisional funding that Taquanta had offered had long since evaporated.
“The suggestion that Nako received preferential or irregular credit requires context,” Mkhwanazi, Nako’s CEO, told us. “PetroSA approached Nako to urgently assist in offloading diesel cargoes under significant time pressure … Nako stepped in at PetroSA’s request.”
Nako doesn’t pay
Nako had been given 60 days to pay the R933-million to PetroSA, “which will allow Nako to make collections from their clients”, the trading team wrote.
When Nako paid, PetroSA would in-turn pay Gunvor, the Swiss commodities giant who had provided the diesel in the first place.
Sixty days later though, Nako still hadn’t come up with the almost R1-billion. Instead, records show that Nako began paying PetroSA in R20-million/week instalments.
It’s unclear whether PetroSA had, by this point, lifted the holding certificate and allowed Nako to take the fuel on credit. A source within PetroSA alleges that the holding certificate was quietly lifted in September, while Ngwenya told us that Nako had instead arrange to pay for the fuel in cash in tranches.
Either way this was a bad deal for PetroSA: at R20-million a week it would take Nako almost a year to pay for the fuel.
“The terms and structure of those instalments formed part of evolving commercial arrangements, which remain the subject of ongoing discussions,” Mkhwanazi told us.
She also insists that her company ultimately made very little money off the Jag Pushpa deal, and that any discounts it received were swallowed up by the falling fuel price or passed on to its clients.
In December 2024, Nako made one last payment of R1.7-million and then stopped paying altogether. Internal records show that in April this year, Nako still owed PetroSA R825-million.
No one from Nako would explain why they stopped paying. All they would say was that PetroSA owed money to Nako as well and that this gave Nako the opportunity to negotiate.
“It is important to note that PetroSA currently owes Nako a substantial sum. This is not consistent with the narrative of one-sided benefit,” Mkhwanazi told us in April. “Both parties are presently engaged in detailed discussions in order to reconcile trades, which is an industry norm.”
Holding the state to ransom
Again, it’s important to go back to what should have happened. If this had been a normal trade and Nako had provided a guarantee, PetroSA would have called up the guarantee as soon as Nako missed the 5 September deadline.
With no guarantee in place, however, Nako could hold PetroSA to ransom, insisting that the diesel now be used to settle unpaid debts on another dubious contract.
And with no signed contract Mkhwanazi is even casting doubt on whether a deal exists at all. Sure, Nako took the diesel and sold it, but where is the proof, she asked, of what Nako agreed to pay:
“[N]o purchase and sale agreement existed between the parties prior to Nako offloading the cargo, regardless of PetroSA’s assertions. This is precisely why PetroSA has since entered into negotiations with Nako to reach an amicable resolution.”
Last week, in response to a list of 59 follow-up questions, Ngwenya told us that Nako had reached an undisclosed settlement with PetroSA: “With regard to Nako and PetroSA our accounts have been settled and due to confidentiality I cannot respond of comment on them.”
He added: “Whatever issues we had have been resolved amicably. And all amounts settled.”
Dirty Fuels
“[I]f you want to expose the business of PetroSA you are basically killing it.”
That was Minerals and Petroleum Minister Gwede Mantashe’s take when we asked him, at an October 2023 press conference, why PetroSA refused to disclose the details of its diesel trading business.
“PetroSA is trading with fuel and that is a highly contested space in the market. Nobody in that market will publish their suppliers and their [customers] – nobody. Now you want PetroSA to do that I am saying it’s a formula to close it down,” he said.
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On 26 March 2024, loadshedding came to an abrupt halt, which was great news for the country and terrible news for PetroSA.
“Eskom was a big blow for PetroSA,” Vusi Xaba, then head of trading, conceded when we spoke to him recently.
Anticipating another bad winter, PetroSA had scheduled 200 million litres of diesel to arrive in April 2024.
However, between May (when the Jag Pusha arrived) and July (when it discharged), Eskom’s two Open Cycle Gas Turbines had produced 260 GWh of electricity, down from 1 165 GWh a year earlier.
With the tide going out, PetroSA was left scrambling.
The Nako deal – concluded under PetroSA’s veil of secrecy with no contract and no guarantees – had resulted in a R19-million loss to PetroSA according to the internal memo, while Nako had walked away with a R96-million discount.
What our investigation suggests, however, is that the bigger prize for Nako was leverage.
For months, PetroSA had been sitting on a cargo of problematic fuel provided by Nako that PetroSA couldn’t sell. Nako wanted R648-million. And now it had a way to get it.
That’s in part 2 of our Dirty Fuels investigation.
