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News from Mackay

12 April, 2022
L to R Yannik Olejas, Charlie Bezzina, John Vella, Matty Vella, Keith Brown, Vic Camilleri, and Joe Camilleri

Our men’s dinner club met on Monday 28th March. Chairman Kevin McEvoy opened with a welcome to a good crowd of members and also to our Guest Speaker Jannik Olejas from Mackay Sugar.

For the reflection, Des Crowe started off with some humour and then followed up with a question! What is the celebration for the first Sunday after Easter? Answer! Divine Mercy Sunday. Des spoke about the Divine Mercy and suggested we follow up with the daily prayers shown in the brochure ‘Novena Of The Divine Mercy’. We followed on with the prayer to our patron ‘The Prayer to Mary McKillop’. Chairman Kevin said Grace. A delicious meal then followed.

Graham introduced our guest speaker Jannik Olejas who is the Chief Executive Officer of Nordzucker Mackay Sugar. Jannik (Pronunciation is Yahnik) is from Copenhagen Denmark, has extensive experience initially with Sales and Marketing and subsequently with agriculture. Yahnik has worked internationally with clients, suppliers, and stakeholders across Europe. He originally was employed with Danisco Sugar since 1992. It then merged with Nordzucker. Yahnik has Academic qualifications from the University of Copenhagen. He took up as General Manager here when Nordzucker joined Mackay Sugar and has been CEO since September 2020. Yahnik spoke of the plans for the future with a win-win for the company and the growers. Also about ways of improving reliability with milling and service delivery. Yahnik was very generous with his time and spent most of it answering questions, even when the dinner concluded members and Yahnik continued much talk and laughter. As one member said, his talk was ‘fantastic’, When introduced, Graham mentioned what Google said about his name. Jannik means! ‘God is Gracious’.

Our next dinner is on Tuesday 26th April (Monday is Anzac day). Our venue now for every dinner is at the City Bowls Club, Shakespeare St. We meet on the last Monday of the month at 6.30 pm for a 7 pm start and regardless of where you live, if you are in Mackay visiting you are most welcome to join us.