Aluminium Company of Nigeria

16 We loaned it to them—RUSAL

By Soni Daniel, Regional Editor, North

ABUJA—Accusations of asset stripping at the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria re-echoed, yesterday, following the discovery of a 50,000-litre oil tank belonging to the company in nearby Ibom Power Company, which is owned by Akwa Ibom State Government.

The report is coming barely a month after BFIG, the American firm that the court vested the ownership of the company with, cried out that the Russian firm, RUSAL, that was still laying claims to ownership after being sacked by the Supreme Court, was actively looting the assets of the firm, with a view to stifling the reopening of the plant by the real owners.

Although RUSAL laid off many of its workers and shut the plants early this year, on the grounds that it did not have steady gas supply, coupled with the uncertainty over the ownership, it had, nonetheless, continued to play with the assets of the firm.

BFIG returns to Supreme Court

BFIG has already returned to the Supreme Court pleading the apex court to compel the Bureau for Public Enterprise, BPE, on whose back RUSAL rode to the occupation of te premises of the firm, to comply with the order dismissing it from the plant.

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Workers of the Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON) and Ikot Abasi community youth groups have raised the alarm over alleged asset stripping in the company, which has been without a legal management since the court sacked the Russian firm, UC RUSAL, from running it.

Although UC RUSAL suspended production in the first quarter of the year, it has nevertheless continued to lay claim to the ownership of ALSCON, insisting that the Supreme Court ruling of 2012 does not stop it from manning the steel firm.

While production has been halted, RUSAL is allegedly engaged in systematic stripping of the assets in a bid to cripple the plant and frustrate the American firm, BFIG, which the court recognised as the bonafide buyers of the firm. RUSAL dismissed the allegation, saying it was merely ridding its territory of obsolete assets.

The workers, under the aegis of the Metal Products Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (MPSSAN), alleged that UC RUSAL had been dismantling and selling for cash stem rods and anodes, vital components of the plant used in the manufacture of steel ingots.

A spokesman of the workers association told reporters in Abuja that the Russian firm, which had failed in recent times to pay salaries to workers, was also cutting and melting the bussbar/risers used in transmitting electric current to the production pots for melting aluminium and selling them as ingots.