Finance Minister’s Company Hired In NIA’s US$8.9m Contract -Exposes PDS-styled deal.

A company belonging to Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has been hired as underwriters of almost 8.9million dollar contract that the National Identification Authority (NIA) awarded a week ago.

Enterprise Insurance, which was co-founded by Mr. Ofori-Atta and Board member of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Keli Gadzekpo, became the benefactors of this juicy contract despite the fact that the amount far exceeds the companies current minimum capital of GHC 15 million and a future minimum capital of GHC 50 million.

Whatsup News is in possession of a December 27th 2019 documents that confirmed parts of the contract to make Enterprise Insurance the guarantor of the NIA’s US$8,890,000.00 deal with the Identification Management Systems ll Limited (IMS ll).

The document is with the title: “Design and Build a Disaster Recovery System for the National Identification Authority”. The contract’s Bond number is also quoted as DABATE0000091900.

It is unclear if the current contract went under any procurement process and Enterprise came under obligation to provide the NIA an Advance Payment Security of up to US$8.9million. 

Critics have wondered how the Finance Minister’s company could have pulled the deal off particularly when the amounts involved far exceeded what the insurance company had in its covers in what has been described as an extreme over-exposure.

It is estimated that Enterprise Group could be making as much as US$1million for the underwriting service that it is providing to IMS ll.

Already, the National Insurance Commission had warned insurance companies from over-exposing themselves. Thus critics have questioned the seeming favouritism the finance minister’s company appear to have enjoyed in this deal.

Other sources have also raised questions about conflict of interest, given the political exposure of Mr. Ofori-Atta.

In the legal documents binding Enterprise Insurance to the responsibility of ensuring that the money is paid back if IMS ll misapplies it.

Meanwhile, IMS ll’s office is listed as the Octagon building in Central Accra. Incidentally, the Octagon reportedly belongs to Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta who allegedly bought it off its broke and desperate original owners for US$12.5million in 2017.

The current questionable contract smacks eerily similar to the infamous Power Distribution Services (PDS) that was also linked to Mr. Ofori-Atta.

The PDS deal collapsed after the private partners engaged Qatar based Reinsurance Company Al-Koot to guarantee a staggering US$ 390 million, which was way above their operational threshold.

In actual fact, IMS ll is a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) put together by the Margins Group for the purpose of executing the rollout of the IMS by the NIA after the Akufo-Addo government had hired the Margins Group in 2017.

IMS ll is a second-generation SPV that evolved from the IMS l, which was hired in 2017 to implement the Foreigners Identification & Management System (FIMS) Project for the NIA. Apparently, the success of the first assignment is what has led to an encore contract from the NIA to now design and build a disaster recovery system.

But the involvement of the Finance Minister’s company in the IMS ll’s deal with the Government is seen as unwholesome. Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu, is on record to have said that people and companies associated with political leaders are naturally exposed politically.