State-owned NTP Radioisotopes, a subsidiary of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (Necsa), has denied reports that the medical isotope producer is to be sold to US radiopharmaceutical company Lantheus Medical Imaging (LMI).

Responding to media reports about a pending sale, NTP board chairperson Dr Namane Magau said this week that LMI was one of NTP’s largest clients and that it enjoyed a close working relationship with the US firm. She explained that LMI, and other pharmaceutical companies, had expressed their concern during the South African firm’s extended shutdown, but stressed that their support should not be “wilfully misinterpreted to mean anything else”.

“There has been absolutely no offer made by LMI to purchase NTP, and the mere suggestion of such is quite frankly ridiculous,” said Magau, adding that the suggestion that a State-owned asset could “arbitrarily be disposed of by a Minister is either poorly informed, or deliberately misleading”.

Former Necsa board members, who were fired earlier this month when Energy Minister Jeff Radebe removed the entire board, told media outlets that NTP was to be sold to its US customers. Quoting former directors, including Dr Kelvin Kemm and Pamela Bosman, Moneyweb reports that some members of the former board believe that their axing was directly linked to the pending sale, which they objected to.

Radebe, however, said he removed the board, owing to its “failure to execute its statutory mandate in a satisfactory and prudent manner”. At the time, he also said that several board members had shown “ineptitude and deliberate acts of defiance”, which had resulted in setbacks, including a halt in production of radioistopes at NTP.

NTP was ordered to shut down its reactor at Pelindaba, in Gauteng, in November last year, after what Kemm at the time described as a minor technical problem as a result of paperwork errors that could cause potential safety problems. Production was restarted in February, but in June it was shut down again after excess hydrogen was detected in one of the production hot cells.

Last month, the National Nuclear Regulator allowed NTP to resume production of medical isotopes.

Before the shutdown, NTP was a profitable R1.3-billion turnover company.