Seaflower plant ‘not for sale’

BUSINESSMAN Adriaan (AJ) Louw, majority shareholder of Seaflower Pelagic Processing (SPP) at Walvis Bay, says his plant is not for sale.

Three local fishing companies and an individual have reportedly approached Louw with offers to buy the facility on 14 000 square metres, consisting of a processing/freezer plant, cannery and fishmeal plant.

The plant has the potential to employ 1 100 people.

Louw confirmed that four companies have made offers to buy the plant in the last two months, which he declined on the basis that they are currently busy regulating their position with shareholders Fishcor.

“You cannot sell a business if it is a distress parcel. You have to sell a business when all the issues have been cleared,” he says.

Louw says rumours of the sale of the processing plant are driven by certain individuals, whom he refers to as “the hyenas in the fishing industry”.

The company’s set-up has been a bone of contention since the arrest of former minister of fisheries and marine resources Bernhard Esau.

Fishcor was established by an act of parliament, however, Louw says SPP is yet to find out how they ended up in their current predicament.

“I am very sad about what happened here. I am very disappointed that I was never informed of what happened before the alleged misconduct of Fishcor, who was our partner. What makes me bitter is how the government has treated the situation this year,” Louw says.

The company experienced a year of no operations, which Louw says resulted in dismal financial performance.

This was due to their partner Fishcor, he says.

The company has accumulated losses in excess of N$100 million this year due to no business activities and a quota which was not fully issued.

They are not putting in a claim for N$250 million for the 95 000 tonnes that have been outstanding from 2018 to 2020, which will accumulate after 31 December.

SPP survived this year through the drought-relief tender in supplying 2,4 million tins of pilchards, worth N$40 million, which were delivered to the Office of the Prime Minister.

Louw says this was never made public and they are still waiting fopr the Office of the Prime Minister’s to do an official handover.

“Why are we good enough to do this, but we are not good enough to operate our business? The government can trust us with a N$40 million tender and we delivered during the state of emergency?” he asks.

Louw has since urged president Hage Geingob to intervene in the matter between the company and the ministries of fisheries and state-owned enterprises on behalf of the investor as well as all workers.

“We are raising our hand two fold: firstly on behalf of the investor, which we want to help us to restore investors’ confidence, not only in the fishing industry in Namibia, but internationally also, because Namibia has been damaged internationally on an exponential scale, and secondly, for the workers,” Louw says.

SPP is currently operating with a skeleton staff after more than 400 of its 650 workers left the company for Tunacor Fishing when the company failed to secure enough quotas.

Tunacor is one of the companies which recently received a governmental objective quota of hake to re-employ the fishermen who were retrenched or lost their jobs in 2015 and 2018.

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