Despite recent claims by Brazilian owned HRT Namibia that they have found economically unviable oil deposits in Namibia, South African companies seem eager to invest in the country’s oil wealth.
The Villager can reveal that a South African communication company, Labat Africa Limited, announced last week that they have invested US$14 million (approximately N$135m) on the current exchange rate to acquire 85% shares in Palatina which has blocks of oil in Namibia which are still under exploration.
According to a statement released by Labat Ltd last Thursday, the company’s chief executive officer, Brian van Rooyen said they had signed a deal with Amicitia Holdings to buy the firm’s entire shareholding in exploration company Palatina Petroleum.
Palatina has an 85% participating interest in three oil and gas exploration licences issued by the Namibian Government. The remaining 15% are held by the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia (NamCor).
The transaction gives Labat the right to engage in the exploration and development of offshore oil on acreage spanning 25 000km² in the Walvis and Lüderitz Basins.
In the past, Labat Africa Limited has gone out of the core investment portfolio when they engaged South African, business tycoon and Jacob Zuma’s nephew Khulubuse Zuma in his company Aurora Empowerment Systems although the venture did not last long.
Labat Africa Limited, through its subsidiaries, engages in the provision of traffic control technology and manufacture of electronic chips in South Africa.
The company also designs, manufactures, and markets analogue and mixed signal integrated circuits (ICs) and offers application specific ICs, which are used in the energy measurement, telecommunications, ID and security industries.
Labat Ltd also provides a traffic management system to municipalities and provincial governments.
It has developed a range of licence plate recognition and image archiving technologies that automate the job of manually processing traffic photographs.
The system is able to read the licence plate of an offending vehicle from a negative.
Although Labat does not reveal on their website whether they are coming to Namibia because they believe there are viable resources, information available shows that they are looking to acquire oil blocks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and gas assets in South Africa.
The Villager investigations also revealed that there have been numerous United States of American companies that have engaged American research consultancy firm Ergo International to follow up on the possibility of investing in this country.
One of Ergo directors, Bottomly Gordon, confirmed that there has been increased interest from American companies to invest in either the mining industry or the oil industry.
"I am not in a position to give names of the companies that have contacted us but there have been over 20 American investors that have engaged our company to get insight on the investment set up in Namibia," Bottomly told The Villager in a recent Skype interview.
In the past, countries that have found oil both in Africa and the Middle East were never given the actual oil deposits in those countries as investors are sometimes not eager to release the comprehensive figure as that would dig into their profits.
The hype outside Namibia about possible investment is so much so that even companies which are not originally in the oil industry are eager to invest in the Namibian oil industry last week.
Although Labat Ltd is a huge investment company in South Africa their interest in the Namibian oil industry raises eye brows as their share has tumbled from 30 cents to 25 cents at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in the past month.
Possibilities could be that the South Africa company is really eager to invest in Namibian oil or that they are looking for avenues to improve their share trade.