UT Bank saved Akufo Addo and Ken Ofori-Atta’s Company-Amoabeng

Ghana’s TV3 will this evening air a brutally candid interview with the Chief Executive Officer of the defunct UT Bank who would reveal how his bank saved the then Presidential Candidate Akufo Addo and Ghana’s Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta’s company from collapsing.

In the programmes titled Business Focus, President of UT Holdings, Prince Kofi Amoabeng who has not hidden his sentiments that the Akufo Addo government and Finance Minister Ken Ofri-Atta deliberately collapsed his bank, will that while President Nana Akufo-Addo was in opposition in 2003, he borrowed money from UT, ostensibly to fund his political campaign.

“In actual fact, our president; today’s president, when he was in opposition in his own party in around 2003, he came to UT of all places, a local company and we gave him a loan and he admits that,” Amoabeng said in the interview according to a preview report by TV3.

“The Minister of Finance, same thing; his own company would have gone down…and I said this’s Ghanaian company and they still got the potential and we help them out,” Mr Amoabeng said in the interview which would air around at 6:30 p.m. today on TV3.

The Bank of Ghana (BoG) on Monday, August 14, 2017 revoked the licences of UT and Capital banks due to their insolvency, leading to the takeover of the two banks by GCB Bank in a bizarre circumstance involving a dawn raid and massive police dispatch at the headquarters of UT bank.

UT Bank directors were accused of mismanaging the bank which had previously won several awards as one of the most vibrant local banks in the country.

In a recent forum, Amoabeng narrated how when UT bank faced financial difficulties and needed to raise funds to meet the December 2018 deadline for all banks to meet a GHC 400 million minimum capital requirement, they had introduced a foreign investor to the BoG.

The UT boss explained how the BoG had agreed in principle about the arrangement and had informed UT it would communicate with it in a few weeks. Amoabeng stated that a few weeks after that meeting, the BoG secretly wrote to UT’s investors that the central bank will allow the investor to inject funds into UT bank. This was done without informing UT Bank, Amoabeng said tearfully.

At the time of UT’s collapse, provisional figures showed the total liability of UT Bank stood at GH¢850 million while its total assets were pegged at GH¢112 million.

Mr Amoabeng has since the revocation of the licence of UT Bank has been a subject of investigations for what the central bank has termed as ‘willful deceit’.

The businessman revealed he “used to be very, very close to him [Ken Ofori-Atta]” but said, “I’m sure now I’m not his friend anymore”.

He recalled how Mr Ofori-Atta called him on phone the day before his bank’s licence was revoked but the Finance Minister never mentioned anything about it.

According to him, they had a “normal chat” which bothered on family, noting he woke up the next morning, August 4, 2017, to find several missed calls on his phone.

“I woke up in the money and…I had 66 missed calls and I said the world is coming to an end,” he said in the interview, noting he immediately called his daughter who broke the news of the collapse of UT Bank to him.