The Akufo Addo government has once more chalked another controversial feat of clearing alleged corrupt officials in the illegal Rosewood trade.
A committee set up by the government to probe the illegal Rosewood trade, claims it found no substantial evidence on officials involved in the illegal felling of the rare Rosewood in the northern part of the country of such claims despite an earlier independent investigation by Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international environmental watchdog.
In a rather bizarre conclusion contained in its report, the committee issued a press statement on February 14, 2020, saying it “did not have adequate evidence to establish corruption cases against any official of government.”
In a twists and turn 13-page report, the committee headed by the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Kwaku Asoma-Cheremeh, was reluctant to admit official involvement in the illegal Rosewood trade.
On one hand, it admitted that Rosewood permits were forged, but claimed it was done on the blindside of officials.
“…a number of permits issued for Rosewood were diverted to Vietnam and volumes approved on the permits were altered. Collaboration with Vietnamese Customs showed that some companies produce such fictitious documents at the blind side of Ghanaian officials,” the report read.
However, on Tuesday, July 30, 2019, EIA released a statement that shows that since 2012 over six million trees of Rosewood have been illegally felled in Ghana and smuggled to China.
In its report titled ‘BAN-BOOZLED: How Corruption and Collusion Fuel Illegal Rosewood Trade in Ghana’ that despite the ban in Ghana on Rosewood exports, over 540,000 tons of rosewood – the equivalent of 23,478 twenty-foot containers or approximately 6 million trees – were illegally harvested and imported into China.
The report emphatically pointed out that this illegal trade was enabled by high-level official collusion, comprising official from the Forestry Commission headed by Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie (Sir John). “EIA’s investigation documents a massive institutionalized timber trafficking scheme, enabled by high-level corruption and collusion,” the report read.
According to EIA, intercepted Rosewood Traffickers admitted that officials from the Forestry Commission, are complicit in the scheme.
Since the Report of the EIA, Sir John has been talking as he is fingered as a major culprit.
It will be extremely difficult for officials of the Akufo Addo administration to extricate themselves and feign ignorance of the trade as the Rosewood trade has been compared to illegal gold mining (Galamsey) which several officials of the government have been caught in.
Also, two notorious Chinese illegal operators in the Rosewood Trade and Illegal gold mining activities, Helena Huang and Aisha Huang respectively, were secretly sneaked out when caught in the act.
Eventually, Senior Minister Yaw Osafo Marfo will go to the United States to justify the release of the Chinese culprits.