Aliko Dangote, president of Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), says his company has acquired a 25 per cent stake in Kenya Pipeline Company to facilitate the distribution of petroleum products across the region.
Dangote announced the deal on Wednesday at the Financial Times Africa Summit in London, according to Reuters.
“We bought 25 per cent of their pipeline network for the distribution of petroleum products,” the industrialist said.
Bloomberg valued the transaction at approximately $327 million.
The acquisition comes as Dangote expands his energy investments across Africa, including plans to build a 700,000-barrel-per-day refinery at Kenya’s Lamu port.
On September 30, Dangote and Kenyan President William Ruto broke ground on the proposed $16 billion refinery project.
Dangote said the refinery, modelled on his Nigerian facility, would be commissioned within 40 months.
“We will come back here and commission this refinery in 40 months from today. The East African refinery is designed to process approximately 700,000 barrels of crude per day, it will also generate 1,000 megawatts, twice that of Lagos,” he said.
He also outlined the refinery’s planned petrochemical and energy output, including polypropylene, base oil and jet fuel supplies.
“We have 1 million tons of polypropylene and we also have a base oil production that we’ll supply and also we will supply at least 20 percent of jet fuel consumed by Europe and the UK, like what we did during this crisis,” he added.
On Tuesday, Ruto said private investors had acquired a 25 per cent stake in Kenya’s pipeline network from public entities, but did not identify the buyers.
Earlier this year, the Kenyan government sold a 65 per cent stake in Kenya Pipeline Company through an initial public offering (IPO), marking its first major share sale in two decades.
The sale formed part of the government’s efforts to raise revenue amid limited fiscal space.
