Aveng CEO Sean Flanagan has announced his retirement and will step down in March, after more than five years at the top.
“He has led Aveng with energy and passion to deliver the strategy during particularly challenging financial times and through the global Covid-19 pandemic,” the company, valued at about R800m on the JSE, said on Wednesday.
“The board is grateful for his immense contribution during this time and is pleased that he will remain on the board,” the infrastructure, resource and mining group added.
Flanagan, who was promoted to CEO in February 2019, will be replaced by Scott Cummins, the current CEO of Aveng’s largest unit, McConnell Dowell.
Cummins graduated from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia with a civil engineering degree before obtaining an MBA from Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, and has almost four decades of experience as a contractor in engineering, construction, oil, gas and infrastructure industries. He joined Aveng in 2015.
In line with the group’s long-term strategy, it will move the group’s base to Australia and group CFO Adrian Macartney will move from Johannesburg to Melbourne as part of the switch.
Flanagan told Business Day in August that the hardships of the local environment, such as rolling power cuts and issues with Transnet, made it essential for Aveng to diversify away from SA and look at opportunities elsewhere in Africa, as it swung from an annual profit of R130m in its 2022 financial year to a loss of R1.3bn in 2023.
This was partly because of a big hit it took in the Southeast Asia business unit of McConnell Dowell, primarily from the Batangas liquefied natural gas (BLNG) terminal project in the Philippines.
With Michelle Gumede
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