Page 12 - DMEA Week 10 2021

DMEA REFINING DMEA

Angola to name winner of Soyo

refinery contract on March 15

AFRICA ANGOLA’S Ministry of Mineral Resources and private investment law had made it “necessary
Petroleum (MIREMPET) is slated to name the to hold additional clarification meetings with
winner of a tender for the construction of a new competitors.”
refinery in Soyo early next week, on March 15. As of late December, MIREMPET had
MIREMPET wrapped up the bidding process received nine final bids for the refinery contract
for the contract, which envisions the building a and had named the bidders: Atis Nebest-Angola,
100,000 barrel per day (bpd) oil-processing plant a local firm; China Petroleum Pipeline (CPP);
in Angola’s Zaire Province, in late December. It Gemcorp Capital (UK); Jiangsu Sinochem Con-
had originally planned to select the winner of the struction Co. (China); Quanten Consortium
tender before the end of 2020 but the deadline (US); SDRC (China); Satarem (Switzerland);
was pushed back twice, first to March 1 and then Tobaka Investment Group (South Africa), and a
to March 15. consortium formed by China National Machin-
The ministry justified the first postponement ery & Equipment Import & Export Corporation
by saying that the potential investors needed to (CMEC) and two relatively unknown compa-
review their guarantees for investment financ- nies, AIDA and VSF.
ing. It said in a statement at the time that the Since then, one of the bidders has dropped
bidders would have to work “through renowned out of the contest. MIREMPET has not yet iden-
financial institutions, as well as [re-affirm] the tified the entity in question, but it has indicated
corporate structures involved” for this part of that all of the other eight have completed the due
the process. diligence process carried out by its contractor,
Then last week, it explained that it had put PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
off the announcement yet again at the request of The ministry began accepting bids for the
some of the bidders. project early last year and had hoped to declare
After the presentation of the ministry’s pre- the winning contractor in April. However, it
liminary report, it said, “some competitors was forced to change the timeline for the tender
asked the evaluation committee for additional because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pan-
information, demanding time for due [dili- demic, which slowed the process of making the
gence].” Additionally, it stated that Angola’s necessary evaluations and adjudications.™

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