The Minority parliamentarians of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has raised red flags that the Akufo Addo administration is secretly negotiating with another company to sell off the Electricity of Ghana (ECG).
This is after the scandalous fiasco of Power Distribution Services (PDS) linked to known faces within the governing party.
The spokesperson on Energy for the Minority, Mutawakilu Adam says it has picked intelligence that the government is negotiating behind closed doors to sell ECG to another company without recourse to laid down procedures.
Last year, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta made a slip after the US$ 1 billion PDS deal to take over ECG collapsed. Mr. Ofori-Atta immediately said a new concessionaire has been lined up to take over the embattled national electricity providers.
This statement came without recourse to the fact that with the collapse of PDS, the government would have to initiate a fresh bid for the ECG and that the Finance Minister couldn’t have known the final candidate, except he was trying something fishy.
Despite failing to name the new company, the Minority spokesperson claims, the details of their allegation would soon be made public.
“We are monitoring closely, and we will resist it with all our strength. We must stop that devil’s advocate. We will resist it,” he warned the president.
According to him, the plan by the ruling administration is to make the deal a management contract through “an underdealing”.
He also alleged that the government will not bring the deal before parliament.
The PDS deal which caused much embarrassment to the Akufo Addo administration was suspended after it turned out that the consortium of local partners and Philippines-based company Meralco had gone to Qatar to secure a fraudulent payment guarantee of US$390 million
Afterwards, the government claimed it detected “fundamental and material breaches of PDS’ obligation in the provision of Payment Securities (Demand Guarantees) for the transaction which has been discovered upon further due diligence.”