The CEO of SGS reacts to the invitation to participate in the working session initiated by the Director General of the Port of Douala.
The head of SGS Cameroon, Patricia Nzondjou, sent an official letter on February 4, 2026, to the Director General of the Autonomous Port of Douala (PAD), in which she requests a refocusing of the working session scheduled for Wednesday, February 4, 2026.
In her letter, the SGS executive acknowledges receipt of the PAD’s invitation, transmitted on February 2 and received by her services on February 3, 2026, at 3 p.m. She also thanks her counterpart for this initiative. However, she notes a significant discrepancy between the proposed agenda and current government instructions.
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Patricia Nzondjou recalls that the Prime Minister’s high instructions, dated January 29, 2026, and reiterated in a letter from the Secretary-General of the Prime Minister’s services on January 30, 2026, exclusively concern the continuation and effective resumption of scanning operations by SGS from January 30, 2026. According to her, these instructions provided for a meeting strictly dedicated to the practical arrangements for this resumption.
However, the agenda attached to the invitation from the Port of Douala includes several points that SGS believes are outside its scope of competence. The CEO specifies that these issues fall under the exclusive prerogatives of the Cameroonian state, SGS’s principal within the framework of their contract, represented by the Minister of Finance.
Among the disputed points are:
the terms for granting SGS authorization to operate at the Port of Douala, in accordance with Article 12 of the decree of January 24, 2019, reorganizing the port;
the conditions for occupying port public domain, as provided for in Article 15 of the same decree;
the system for providing information related to security at the Port of Douala;
the modalities for taking into account the logistical costs incurred by the container terminal management.
The proposed agenda also mentions the examination of the impact of SGS’s activities on the port transit times for goods, deemed negative compared to the competitiveness objectives of the Port of Douala, as well as the hypothesis of collaboration between SGS and Transatlantic.
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In view of this situation, the CEO of SGS believes that these issues should be discussed directly with the government, which is the only body authorized to debate them given the current legal and contractual framework.
“In order to ensure the strict compliance of our discussions with the orientations set by the Prime Minister,” Patricia Nzondjou requests a refocusing of the working session around a single point: the practical organization of the resumption of goods scanning operations by SGS at the Port of Douala.
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