Asanteman to woo investors
Tragedy!
Man beheads wife and son
Agbodo invests ¢1.5b in nephew's name
The
former Chief Executive of the Divestiture Implementation Committee (DIC),
Emmanuel Agbodo will soon be heading for the Fast Track Court to explain how he
obtained as much as ¢1.5 billion to buy treasury bills in his nephew's name.
This follows the conclusion of investigations
by the special Task Force constituted by the government to delve into the
activities of the DIC in respect of the divestiture of some State-Owned
Enterprises (SOEs).
It was detected, for instance, that Mr Agbodo
used an assumed name - Julius Zormelo, (the name of his nephew), to invest the
amount in treasury bills. The money was part of an accrued revenue from
divested SOEs.
Information obtained by "The Evening
News" indicates that the deal began in July 1993 and went undetected,
until investigations were initiated. Mr Agbodo reportedly opened an account in
an Accra bank (name withheld) to invest in the treasury bills for the DIC, but
later had the name of the investment changed to Julius Zormelo.
Documents chanced upon by "The Evening
News" further reveal that since the account has been an investment one, no
particulars or statements exist on it. It is recalled that Mr Agbodo, Mr
Siegfred Sedziafa and Mr Angelo Lassey were recently invited by the Bureau of
National Investigations for questioning.
Agbodo is already before an Accra Community
Tribunal facing charges for allegedly colluding with a Nigerian, Everest Ekong,
Managing Director of Goldcity Communications Group to defraud the state of ¢1.5
billion. He is currently on a 120,000-dollar bail set by the Community
Tribunal.
GRi…/
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Asanteman to woo investors
In order to attract investors to the Ashanti
Region, the Asanteman Council is to establish land banks to make land
acquisition easier. Towards that end, a committee has been set up to oversee
their establishment. The Asantehene, Otumfuo II, who announced this at Kumasi
on Monday, said the move was tailored at supporting the government’s “Golden
Age of Business” agenda.
The Asantehene was speaking during a courtesy
call on him at the Manhyia Palace by Prof. Kasim Kasanga, Minister of Lands and
Forestry. Expressing utter dissatisfaction with varied land issues, the
Asantehene noted that public officials in the land sector had taken undue
advantage of the existing incoherent land policies to pursue their personal
interests.
“The land sector has, for a long time, been
plagued with too much vested interests and fraud. Let’s endeavor to work with
the truth, for if we are able to do that, all the problems relating to lands
administration will be over,” he stated.
Other chiefs present at the brief shared the
sentiments of the Asantehene and went further to criticize the granting of
leases and timber felling permits by the Lands Commission and Forestry Commission
respectively, without the consent of the appropriate traditional rulers.
Prof Kasanga, responding, announced that the
government would soon introduce a new land policy that would remove the current
bottlenecks inherent in the administration of public and stool lands in the
country.
He noted that the administration of public and
stool lands had been beset with a myriad of problems and the forestry sector
had also plunged into confusion especially, with the activities of illegal
chainsaw operators.
Prof Kasanga said the new land policy would
help to fashion out the distinct but collaborative roles of the various sectors
in the land industry the government and traditional rulers in land
administration.
The Minister observed that the success of the
new land policy would depend largely on the support and contribution of chiefs.
In the true spirit of the new positive change, he said, chiefs have a positive
role to play in the formulation and implementation of the new land policy.
“As chiefs, you have a positive role to play.
If you don’t have a role to play, it means the government had already lost the
opportunity of injecting sanity into land administration in this country,”
Prof. Kasanga stated.
Calling for a renewed partnership between the
government and chiefs in land administration, the Minister remarked that, “if
you champion the cause, we will succeed but if you play a passive role, we will
get nowhere.”
Mr Moses Asaga, Minority Spokesman on Finance,
has said that the achievement of macro economic stability is not as a result of
any remarkable government’s policy. He attributed the achievement to the
favourable international economic situation as the prices of gold and cocoa were
stable whiles that of crude oil was low.
Mr Asaga in an interview with the Times
explained that, “there were no trade shocks that would have normally distort
the macro economic situation.” He described the government’s economic
performance for last year as disappointing.
“Their performance have not met the
expectations of Ghanaians, they have not been able to fulfil most of their
targets and promise,” he said. Mr Asaga said that the government borrowed $800
million, which means that they have contributed to an increase in the external
debt by 20 per cent.
On the cedi’s stabilization, he explained, “we
didn’t see the depreciation of the cedi because government refused to spend.”
He said that areas government spent on were statutory but failed to make
discretionary expenditure.
The Minority Spokesman explained that only four
per cent of government’s expenditure went into investment thereby reducing
investment into the productive sectors. “The productive sectors should not be
stifled in a situation where you want the economy to grow,” he said.
He criticised the increase in airport tax, the
imposition of several levies such as the national reconstruction levies on
companies and on industry, which makes Ghana a high cost point of production.
On their promises, he said, “they promised to
create jobs for the people but they have not done it. They couldn’t provide the
affordable medical care, they promised.”
He said that the government promised to look
into school fees but rather fees have gone up. “In 2000, a law student was
paying ¢700,000 but in September, last year, the law student is paying ¢2.2
million.”
Mr Asaga said that the government had not
removed subsidies on agriculture as it has promised. “In fact they could not
remove the subsidies because of government’s decision to join HIPC,” he said.
GRi…/
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Boakye Djan’s nephew cries out
A grieving nephew of the late Kyeremeh Djan,
junior brother of exiled Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) capo,
Captain Kojo Boakye Djan, has rubbished the recently published book on the
treason trial, accusing the author, a former judge of the then National Public
Tribunal of “blatant facts twisting.”
Philip Atta Boakye, who says he personally
witnessed the torture of his uncle who was later to be executed by firing squad
for his alleged role in a coup attempt, described Mr George Agyekum’s 446-page
book, “The Treason Trial of 1986 - Torture and Revolutionary Injustices” as a
face-saving venture.
Motivation for the book, he contends, is a
desire on the part of Agyekum to “make money and to keep Ghanaians in the dark
about some of the horrific, macabre episodes that characterized their detention
and trial.”
Atta Boakye, a torture victim himself, reacted
to the story contained in the book in an emotional, no-holds-barred interview
with the Chronicle last week, emphasizing that the main facts were twisted for
reasons best known to Mr Agyekum.
Mr Agyekum, the author of the book, should tell
Ghanaians why he refused to allow Kyeremeh Djan and Mawuli Goka (a friend of
Kyeremeh Djan) to remove their clothes and show the deep cuts inflicted on them
by their captors to the court.”
“Was George Agyekum not the presiding tribunal
chairman who used his immense experience as a legal man to craftily twist
issues just to get a conviction against Kyeremeh Djan and the rest?” he
queried.
“The first time I saw Mr George Agyekum was at
the National Tribunal at the State House where he was presiding over the case
involving the late Kyeremeh Djan and others,” he exclaimed.
Atta Boakye warned that men like George Agyekum
ought to be watched carefully. He disclosed he was a principal witness in the
treason case, adding that he would have suffered a similar fate but for the
intervention of Mr Peter Nanfuri, former Inspector General of Police and then
Director of the Bureau of National Investigation (BNI).
“Thank God, Peter Nanfuri, who was then the BNI
Director and his team of investigators could not see to a 23-year ‘A’ level
student being charged with treason, he stated.
He said the BNI and the security forces made
everything humanly possible to put words in his mouth, purposely to crucify his
uncle, Kyeremeh Djan. “Nothing spooked me more than seeing the flesh of my
uncle chopped off and given to Mawuli Goka to eat.” Mawuli was also executed by
firing squad for his alleged role in an attempted coup, Chronicle can say.
“I cannot tell Ghanaians about the horrifying
experiences I went through at the BNI. I was tortured on countless number of
occasions and this was always after midnight at the BNI headquarters where I
was interrogated for more than six months.”
Months of torture could not break the spirit of
Boakye, but when agents of the BNI threatened to hand him over to crack
commandos who know how to beat the truth out of stubborn people, Atta cracked
and admitted what his uncle had not done, Chronicle learnt.
“I knew they were going to kill my uncle but I
wanted them to carry on with the killing earlier but the commandos and the BNI
were only interested in the torture,” he explained.
After such threats, everybody was broken down,
especially families of many victims, however, everyone was ready to say
anything at all to please the captors so that the entire nation could enjoy
peace, he explained. Boakye pointed out to the Chronicle that the BNI tried to
throw dust in the eyes of the people by presenting all the allegations leveled
against them as true.
Detainees were forced to make confessions under
duress, he revealed. Peter Nanfuri and his team used the said tactics so
perfectly that George Agyekum in his calibre as a tribunal chairman and his
panel convicted them without hearing the other side.
Jack Bebli only acted upon instructions of
their bosses, Jerry Rawlings, Kojo Tsikata and George Pattington, he alleged.
If Jack Bebli acted wrongly and like a madman he did so for a number of
reasons, he narrated. He described Jack Bebli as a “block-headed man, a beast,
a drug user and added to all that a ruthless murderer.”
In a scathing article published by the
Chronicle a few weeks ago, another victim of the Rawlings era, Mike Adjei,
criticised Mr George Agyekum over his publication.
More…/
War of words between the Majority and Minority
sides in Parliament characterised deliberations in the house on Tuesday.
This was evident as members of both sides had
taken entrenched positions on the state of the nation address delivered by the
President, H.E. John Kufuor. It even got worse and almost chaotic when the MP
for Wenchi West, Hon Asiedu Nketia, requested to know if the Christian brother
of Hon Theresa Tagoe, MP for Ablekuma South, had moved from her official
residence.
A question she did not take lightly, Hon
Theresa Tagoe asked Hon Asiedu Nketia if he had returned the ballot boxes he
stole. Hon Nketia, peeved at the statement, urged the Speaker to compel Hon
Tagoe to withdraw her statement and apologise to him as the allegation of the
stealing had been taken to court and the court had ruled against his
detractors.
He further stated that in the case of Hon
Tagoe, she admitted publicly to the issue and apologised to the general public,
adding that she was even warned by the Chief of Staff.
The Speaker at this point asked Hon Tagoe to
apologise, which shed did. However, she insisted her statement was a fact, but
this was not acceptable to the House and she must withdraw it.
GRi…/
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The Judicial Service has designated one of the
Fast Track Courts as Tax and Commercial Court. This followed an appeal made by
the Minister of Finance to the Chief Justice to establish special courts to
handle tax and commercial cases to facilitate the promotion of the Golden Age
of Business.
Deputy Judiciary Secretary, Mr Nicholas
Agbevor, who disclosed this in an interview, said when the minister sought
audience with the Chief Justice on Monday, he explained that a special court
was required to provide the platform for the expeditious disposal of tax,
investment and commercial cases.
The Chief Justice, Mr E.K. Wiredu, explained
that the existing fast track courts are handling these cases, but agreed that
investor confidence be boosted by designating particular courts to handle such
breaches of commercial regulations. He said for this reason, he has designated
one of the existing fast track courts as a commercial, tax and investment
tribunal.
Mr Agbevor said the designated court will
handle cases involving tax default, bank cases, including default in the
payment of loans and investment cases. He added that the special court will
adjudicate in cases involving commercial transactions among Ghanaians, Ghanaians
and foreigners and among foreigners, within Ghana.
Mr Agbevor hinted that when the fast track
courts are extended to the regions, some of them would handle tax and
commercial cases. He said the designated court would operate as a fast track
court, using modern technology such as computers to record proceedings.
The rationale for this, he said, is to ensure
that the cases are expeditiously disposed of and proceedings made available as
and when required by the parties in a dispute. Mr Agbevor said the designated
court would lead to a reduction in the backlog of cases pending before the
courts and build investor confidence in the country’s judicial system.
He said the Minister of Finance and the Chief
Justice discussed ways to generate revenue in the judiciary to meet some of its
needs. Mr Agbevor said the Judicial Service has already taken steps to
streamline judicial administration of the service, adding that ‘this has led to
improvement in revenue generation for the judiciary.
He gave the assurance that measures will be put
in place to ensure the efficient collection and use of revenue. Mr Agbevor also
spoke about plans to improve the conditions of service of members of the
judicial service to perform more efficiently.
More…/
Mr Samuel Asazoa, Finance Officer of the Ga
District Assembly, has categorically denied allegations that he was at the
centre of a financial scandal in which the assembly is alleged to have lost
hundreds of millions of cedis.
He stated that the allegations and subsequent
moves to interdict him were nothing more than a plot hatched by some workers of
the assembly to kick him out of office, in order to further their own selfish
agenda.
The finance officer was reacting to a front-page
report in the Graphic of Monday,
February
4, 2002, in which he and the Coordinating Director of the Assembly,
Mr Kwesi Marfo, were alleged by
assembly sources to have perpetrated financial vices and ripped the assembly of
hundreds of millions of cedis.
According to Mr Asazoa, the allegations of
fraud made against him which linked him with the district coordinating director
as far back as February last year are not only false but also mischievous.
“I was posted to the Ga District Assembly in
June 2001, and actually commenced serious work towards the end of that month or
early July that year. How could I, therefore, have conspired with the
Coordinating Director, who admittedly was in charge of affairs at the assembly
between February and August 2001 in the absence of a substantive DCE, to
perpetrate any financial vices when almost for that period in question, I was
not at post,” he queried.
According to Mr Asazoa, on assuming duty at the
Ga District Assembly, he, in his capacity as finance officer, and in line with
recommendations of the Conference of Auditors, put in place a number of
measures to ensure the prudent management of the assembly’s finances.
“In carrying out these measures, it did not
dawn on me then that I was stepping on powerful toes in the assembly. Now I am
convinced that well placed people in the assembly whose interests might have
been adversely affected by my official actions, want me out so that they could
do their own thing,” he stressed.
Mr Asazoa recalled that not too long after he
assumed office, attempts were made to get him to surrender certain duties of
his office to some other preferred workers as well as circumvent certain
laid-down financial regulations.
He referred to one such situation in which the
Chief Executive of the assembly directed him to surrender Pay Vouchers (PVs) to
the budget officer of the assembly, but with which he could not readily comply
because it was improper.
“The major problem of the assembly at the time
I assumed office was that a lot of non-accounting staff were performing the
duties of finance officers. The entire revenue collection was in the hands of a
casual worker and not the finance officer as stipulated in Part VIII of the
Financial Memorandum. I stopped these practices and others and that did not go
down well with a lot of people in the assembly,” he said.
Mr Asazoa said that at no point in time has any
auditor approached him or called him to answer any query for any financial
transaction deemed or suspected to be doubtful. “I, therefore, find the
interdiction move a very strange one which is clearly out of tune with normal
working procedures,” he stressed.
Mr Asazoa said that even though he had
personally seen a copy of the said interdiction letter unofficially at the
Local District Ministry earlier, no such letter had actually been served on
him. “As far as I am concerned, I have not been interdicted, and I consider
myself to be fully at post and carrying on my normal duties,” he said.
He pointed out that he had in anticipation of
such plot, informed his superiors at the head office of the Controller and
Accountant General’s Department in Accra of the situation at the Ga District
Assembly and said he welcomes the conduct of a full and dispassionate
investigation into the matter.
“I wish to state that I have nothing against
the DCE or anybody at the assembly. I am only trying to do my work as honestly
and efficiently as possible, so that the assembly succeeds,” he added.
GRi…/
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The
East Akyem District Education Endowment Fund, established in the 1998/99
academic year to raise money to improve the quality of education is in a big
mess. This is due to the fact that the District Education Service, charged to
collect the levy on behalf of the Fund has failed to pay all the money
collected into the Fund for its disbursement.
In
February 1999, the District Assembly approved a levy of 1,000, cedis payable by
all pupils in the basic schools. The Fund would be used to support some
education-related programmes to help raise standard of education, which had
been falling in the district.
The
levy is to be collected by the District Education Office and paid into a
special account at the Ghana Commercial Bank. At the time of the approval the
public enrolment in the District was 38,000 with an expected revenue of ¢38
million each year.
The Assembly set out modalities for the disbursement of the Fund after three years of its establishment. This was how the Fund was to be disbursed: 20 per cent of the Fund was allocated to motivate the teachers especially those in the remote areas, 20 per cent for orientation courses for newly trained teachers, 30 per cent to organise District Primary Six Examination and 15 per cent for the organisation of quiz competitions in the district. Unfortunately, three years after its establishment the fund had yielded less than the annual expected revenue.
At
the recent meeting of the social service sub-committee of the Assembly which
was mandated to manage the Fund, it came to light that only ¢35 million of an
estimated revenue of ¢114 million has been paid into the fund. A cross-section
of the headteachers interviewed maintain that the money they collected from the
pupils have been paid to the District Education Office.
It
is really ironical that the very institution the Fund is supposed to help is
sabotaging it. To this end, the District Chief Executive has been charged by
the Assembly to set up a special audit force to retrieve all monies collected
for the past three years to enable the schools benefit from the fund.
More…/
Tragedy!
Man beheads wife and son
Tragedy
struck the people of Anom, a village near Asuboi in the Suhum Kraboa-Coaltar
District of the Eastern Region, on Sunday January 27, when a 38-year old
farmer, Kwaku Dzila, killed his wife and beheaded his son.
Dzila,
a Togolese national, after carrying out the dastardly act immediately dumped
their bodies into a cocoa sack and under the cover of the night threw the
bodies into a latrine pit and subsequently covered them with sand to erase any traces.
The
victims, Adwoa Dzila, 32 and Kpoga Dzila 15, The Statesman learnt that, until
their untimely death, had been living under tears as the erratic husband
constantly threatened them with death.
When
information about the murder came out the following day, Dzila suddenly became
violent threatening to kill anyone who comes close to him. The residents of the
village became helpless as nobody wanted to suffer a similar fate that befell
the two helpless victims. Opanin Kwesi Djadey, spokesman for the community,
said such tragic incident has never happened in the village before.
Djadey
explained that Kwaku Dzila, popularly called “Teacher,” is a known drug addict
and alcoholic whom, when under the influence of drugs and drinks, can cause
mayhem. He constantly fought with the wife to the chagrin of the entire
community, the spokesman said.
However,
on the fateful day, Opanin Dzadey said, upon taking his “drugs” and akpeteshie,
Dzila could not contain his usual anger and eventually carried out threats’ of
killing the wife.
In
view of his violent behaviour, a message was sent to his brother at Koforidua
who came to the rescue of the villagers by persuading him to calm down with a
promise to take him to Koforidua. However, on their way to Koforidua, the
village spokesman said, Dzila’s brother handed him over to the police at Suhum.
The
police then accompanied them back to the village where a search was conducted.
The two bodies were eventually dug out from the latrine pit. However, to their
chagrin, the head of the son, Kpoga, was missing.
Dzila
reportedly told the police during interrogation that Kpoga’s head was taken
away by his brother-in-law, whom he called “Joe.”
When
the police was contacted, they confirmed the story and said Dzila has been
arraigned before the Suhum Community Tribunal with a charge of provisional
murder. His plea was not taken and was subsequently remanded in police custody
to re-appear on February 14 when lovers will be celebrating the Valentine Day.
GRi…/
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