The Vice Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Prof. Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, has promised that the next NDC government will probe the shady contract anchoring the mandatory Covid-19 test administration at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) and scrap if it fails scrutiny.
In a meeting with media editors in Accra yesterday, Prof. Agyemang said the contract given to a company that was sole-sourced even though it has no laboratory of its own will only be allowed to continue by the NDC government if the probe proves that its award was meritorious.
Frontiers Health Care Services Ltd, the company given the contract has also been unveiled as having a rather shady ownership, with its parent company, the Peters Family Company, traced to a tax haven in Dominica.
WhatsUp News’ investigations to find out who the beneficial owners of the company are, hit a dead-end when the Registrar of companies in Dominica told the digital paper that even the authorities in Dominica do not exactly know who the beneficial owners of its mother company are.
However, the Peters Family Company has been linked to Nigerian billionaire, Benedict Peters, who has reportedly been on the run from the law in Nigeria after committing gargantuan financial crimes.
The Peters Family Company is said to own Frontiers Health Care Services through another company in a labyrinthine arrangement.
The company was hired in a sole source by the government a few months after it was formed and had no track record in health, to undertake the contract to administer the test at the KIA.
It is charging a whopping US$150 per test in what critics have described as a rip-off.
It is estimated that by December, the company would have made at least US$30million from the contract. And it is using the laboratory facilities and staff of other state entities for the tests but is giving them a paltry US$ 11 per test in return.
It is widely suspected that Frontiers is linked to “family and friends” of President Akufo-Addo. This is because, the deal was midwifed by Prof. William Kwabena Ampofo, Head of Virology at the Noguchi Memorial Institute who is a cousin to President Akufo-Addo.