Revealed! Akufo Addo Blindsides Parliament In US$900 mil Chinese Power Contract

President Akufo Addo in November 2019 committed Ghana to a whopping US$ 900 million contract with a Chinese power company Powerchina International Group Limited without the proper endorsement by the Ghanaian Parliament as required by law for such international contracts.

Whatsup News can authoritatively report that the consideration of the humongous contract was only finalised late December 2019, despite the fact that the President had cut the sod for the project to commence more than one clear month earlier.

The 23-man Parliamentary committee which finalised contract in retrospect, simply rubber stamped a decision already pushed through by the Presidency.

A copy of the Minute of the fifth seating of the first seating of Parliament available to Whatsup News shows that on December 23, 2019, mostly New Patriotic Party (NPP) Members of Parliament discussed such a huge contract for only one hour before it was adopted.

The MPs who rubberstamped the contract include Anthony Akoto Osei, KT Hammond, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah, among others.

It appears the Minority National Democratic Congress (NDC) Parliamentarians were left in the dark on the deal, Whatsup News gathered.

The MPs sat on the Powerchina contract around 9.30 am and by 10.30, the US$ 900 million contract was adopted, in what critics have described as “fishy”.

The Powerchina contract is a turnkey Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) which will see a contract sum of US$ 366 million pumped into procurement for the construction of a US$ 60-megawatt hydropower plant. Another US$ 55 million will be spent on a 50-megawatt solar power plant and lastly some hefty US$ 474 will go into a 24,000-hectare irrigation scheme, all located in Pawalugu in the Upper East Region.

The Powerchina project is reportedly part of the US$ 2 billion Sinohydro facility being sought from the Chinese by the Ghanaian government.

The revelation of how the Executive Arm of government had virtually turned the Ghanaian parliament into a rubber stamp is coming close in the heels of recent revelations that the same parliament was arm-twisted to grant over US$ 24 million in tax waivers for Platinum Properties, a company  owned by the brother-in-law of President Akufo Addo.