President Julius Maada Bio has received the Annual Report from the Petroleum Regulatory Agency (PRA) and assured them of looking through and called on them to do more reforms.
In his introductory statement before presenting the Report, Executive Chairman of PRA, Brima Baluwa Koroma, said they as a statutory body charged with a lot of responsibilities, among them the mandate to manage government strategic stock, were obliged by law to present a Report on their activities, successes, challenges, and plans for the coming year.
He highlighted the various reforms they had already made through different policies as was advised by President Bio in their previous engagements.
Brima Baluwa Koroma noted that due to those reforms, the Agency was able to double its revenue by almost 128%, adding that the importation of petroleum products and related commodities had also grown by 52%.
He disclosed that they had three operational jetties in the country and although the national storage target was 500 thousand metric tons, the country had approximately 230 thousand metric tons.
Mr Koroma ended by dedicating the Agency’s milestone achievement to the President while thanking his staff at the Agency for their dedicated service.
After receiving the Report, President Julius Maada Bio thanked the Executive Chairman and team for their work and their proactive efforts in ensuring that the Agency was able to succeed on the reforms.
He said they were operating in a very sensitive sector and that every individual, one way or the other, interacted with it at one time or another.
President Bio commended the team for the review of the pricing formula and the additional storage while noting that the increase in revenue generation in the sector was a welcome development.
“I am proud that we have an open sector now and I want to challenge you to do more reforms and create an open playing field for more players in the sector,” he ended.