[miningmx.com] — RAYMOND Chirwa, CEO of Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT), is set to resign at a board meeting of the company’s key shareholders scheduled for Wednesday, according to industry sources.
“It’s obviously quite a stressful job,” said an industry source. “Chirwa’s predecessor, Kuseni Dlamini, was also in the position for a relatively short space of time.”
Calls by Miningmx to Chirwa’s mobile phone went unanswered.
Chirwa was appointed CEO of RBCT in July 2009 after holding the position of general manager of engineering at the company since 2004. He joined RBCT from Eskom.
RBCT, the world’s largest single coal export terminal, has had a troubled time, particularly since expanding to 91 million tonnes/year (Mtpa), a handling capacity it could never meet as deliveries through Transnet Freight Rail’s (TFR’s) rail link from Mpumalanga province have consistently fallen below that.
This year, for instance, RBCT has chopped its coal export target twice from 70Mt at the beginning of the year to 68Mt in March, and then to 63.4Mt with annualised exports as of July at levels even below that.
In the last month, however, operational improvements on the TFR rail link have raised the chance of RBCT meeting its latest export target, which matches coal exports in 2010.
At question time during the recent Johannesburg leg of the Coaltrans conference, Chirwa declined to be pinned down on reasons for the worse-than-expected export performance, or over the negotiations under way with Transnet to increase railage capacity on the line.
RBCT is controlled by coal exporters Anglo American, BHP Billiton, and Xstrata.
