Foskor fined for selling fertiliser

Foskor Vice President Johan Potgieter said on Monday that the company had "accepted responsibility" for the 325 counts of selling the unregistered granular fertilizer made from phosphate.

A Richards Bay court imposed a fine of R756,000, half of which is suspended for five years, and Foskor was ordered to forfeit R3 million to the Criminal Asset Recovery Account.

Potgieter said that an inspection in 2006 carried out by agriculture inspectors was the first since the company had bought a plant in 2001.

"We have the licences. It is over now and it's gone. If we knew it, we would have applied for it."

The Zululand Observer newspaper reported that Foskor had bought the fertiliser plant in 2001 believing that all the permits were in order.

It quoted Potgieter as saying: "However, we were visited in 2006 by inspectors who instructed us that we were in fact not licenced to sell fertilizer.

"We took immediate steps and in our own investigations discovered and pointed out to them that there had in fact been 756, not 325, sales without permits," said Potgieter.

It was not clear when the permits had expired or whether the previous owners had had the necessary permits.

It is not also not known when the inspectors had previously visited the plant prior to 2001.

Potgieter told Sapa that in the five years Foskor had owned the plant there had been no inspections by agriculture inspectors.

The agriculture ministry spokesman Godfrey Mdluli said he was not familiar with the incident and could not immediately comment.

Foskor's major shareholder is the Industrial Development Corporation, which is planning to list Foskor on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2009.

India's Coromandel Fertilisers is reportedly planning to increase its stake in Foskor to 15% from 2.5% at the time of the JSE listing.

In the year to March Foskor produced 691,887 tons of phosphoric acid in Richards Bay, more than 10% above the previous record set in the year to March 2006.

Foskor's revenue increased by 52% to R4.5 billion in the year to March. Operating profit tripled to R1.2 billion.

Source: Sapa

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