Indigenous Oil Marketing Companies are said to have ‘severed’ ties with the Association of Oil Marketing Companies (AOMCs) to form a new group, following what they consider to be the failure of their mother association to protect them from unfair treatments in the downstream industry.
The breakaway group, which is expected to launch a new national association to be called “Association of Indigenous Oil Marketing Companies (AIOMCs),” has since picked up forms to register the association, DAILY GUIDE gathered.
Sources say the decision was borne out of the feeling that the leadership of AOMCs was only interested in championing the course of the foreign OMCs in the association at the expense of the indigenous ones, which represent more than half of the AOMCs membership.
The breakaway group alleged that many of the challenges confronting the industry had been left unattended to by the AOMCs, intimating that “the foreign OMCs are favoured in all the sectors of the industry whiles indigenous ones suffer.”
The sources pointed to two distinct payment regimes in which foreign OMCs are given credit purchase arrangements for lifting petroleum products from the Bulk Oil Distributors (BDCs) whilst the indigenous OMCs are made to pay cash.
“So the new AIOMCs want to have one voice to push the same opportunities since they are all in the same market and therefore need a level playing field,” the group indicated.
The breakaway group, comprising 100 indigenous OMCs, believed the formation of the new association would speed up the development of the downstream industry.
“As indigenous OMCs, all our investments in the industry will remain in the country. We won’t fly [repatriate] any dollar outside this country. But the foreign OMCs do fly capital to their home companies,” one source argued.
It claimed that while the foreign OMCs are only concentrated in the urban centres, the indigenous OMCs are spread across the country.
By Ernest Kofi Adu