Bongani Nqwababa and Stephen Cornell will leave the company on Wednesday 31 October 2019 as part of “consequence management”, said Sasol’s board of directors in a regulatory filing on Monday 28 October. Mandla Gantsho chairs the board. Fleetwood Grobler has been appointed as the chief executive in the place of the joint CEOs. He is currently the executive vice president for chemicals at the New York Stock Exchange-listed group.

“The board has resolved to ensure that the company lives its values and to ensure that there is a culture of accountability and consequence management. It is also the judgement of the board that, for trust to be restored in the company, a leadership reset is required,” said the company.

In August, Sasol decided to delay the publication of its annual results for the year ended June after it became aware of further delays and cost escalations at it Lake Charles Chemicals Project (LCCP) in Louisiana in the United States of America, where it has been building a chemicals and gas-to-liquids plant for the past five years.

The budgeted initial cost of $8.1-billion at commencement in October 2014 has ballooned to just under $13-billion. Whereas the project was initially pencilled in to achieve beneficial operation in 2018, Sasol now says it is now only 90% complete

“To be clear, the Board has neither identified misconduct nor incompetence on the part of the Joint CEOs,” said Gantsho in the board announcement. Neither did it identify any evidence of criminality in the review into the delay and cost escalation.

The project, which will convert natural gas to vehicle fuel and other chemicals, made Sasol the largest foreign direct investor in the state of Louisiana. At R190-billion, LCCP is Sasol’s single largest capital expenditure.

With the project now nearing completion, Sasol believes that it “will soon start delivering significant strategic and financial benefits to our shareholders and other stakeholders”, it said.

While the investigation into the delays and cost over-runs found no evidence of criminality, it identified the former leadership of the project management team as having engaged in conduct that was inappropriate, demonstrated a lack of competence, and was not transparent. “However, on balance, the Board finds that there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that these individuals acted with an intent to defraud.”

Nqwababa and Cornell were sacrificed in a “leadership reset” for having failed to properly supervise the project team in Louisiana. DM