Martin Amidu who resigned as Special Prosecutor yesterday, reveals that part of the frustrations that President Akufo-Addo used to encumber him to quit stems from the fact that the President knew he was to be investigated over the Agyapa Mineral Royalties Stinking deal.
Amidu writes in his resignation letter that the President had undercut his progress towards an intent to launch a full-scale corruption investigation into the deal for at least two weeks after Akufo-Addo realized that Amidu was going to come after him over his approval of the deal.
“…Your Excellency was acting as a judge in your own court in usurping my functions to take any independent follow-up actions on the anti-corruption assessment report when you knew from my 13-page letter of 16 October 2020, conveying the conclusions and observations of the anti-corruption assessment report to you that negative anti-corruption assessment had been made against the conduct of your office in the procedure adopted in granting the Executive Approval dated 24 March 2020 and your assent of the Minerals Income Investment (Amendment) Act, 2020 (Act 1024) on 27 August 2020 intended to retroactively impact the parliamentary approval of the transactions document granted on 14 August 2020,” Amidu wrote in his bombshell resignation letter.
Essentially, Mr. Amidu had put it to the face of the President of the Republic of Ghana that he was suspected of complicity in the fraudulent Agyapa Royalties deal to mortgage Ghana’s multi-billion-dollar gold royalties to obscure private interests in the tax haven of Jersey on the British Channel Islands.
Martin Amidu had conducted a damning corruption assessment investigation into the suspicious Agyapa Royalties deal and had submitted his report to President Akufo Addo. According to Amidu, the President has haggled with him on several occasions for him [Amidu] to water down the report, but he disagreed vehemently in what culminated in his eventual resignation.
The Agyapa Mineral Royalties deal entails Government collateralizing Ghana’s Mineral royalties receipt from gold and using it as a special purpose vehicle to borrow money by listing on the London Stock Exchange.
The deal smelled of corruption from the very onset with Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, who is a cousin to the President, using trickery to keep the details of the deal away from Ghanaians.
As a result of the shadiness around the deal, the Minority in Parliament refused to participate in its passage by Parliament leaving only the President’s party’s MPs to pass it. However, Ghanaians felt uncomfortable about the obscurantism around the deal and this jolted the OSP into launching a corruption assessment risk.
The OSP, through this assessment, found out that Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, had engineered for bids to transaction advisors for the deal to be rigged in favour of his private company, Databank Financial Services using a South African company, Imara Corporate Finance (Pty) to front the corrupt move.
Ofori-Atta had also made sure to include the law firm of another cousin of President Akufo-Addo, Gabby Asare Otchere Darko (Africa Legal Associates (ALA)) as legal advisors.
In the details, the SP found out that the Finance Ministry headed by Ofori-Atta had breached the public procurement laws and Ghana’s financial management laws to rig a bidding process to make his company transaction advisor to the multi-billion-dollar deal.
Imara itself had also been suspected of pulling money laundering schemes to receive payments from the Bank of Ghana which had been instructed by Ofori-Atta to pay Imara.
Ofori-Atta had, despite the investigations, managed to keep vital information over the deal to his chest, including the success fee that he agreed to pay Imara and his company Databank.
Amidu flagged the whole deal as shady and sent a copy of his report to President Akufo-Addo. The President, however, sat on it until Amidu angrily informed the public of the report.
According to Amidu’s resignation letter, after he had finished the corruption risk assessment, the intended next line of action was to launch a full-scale corruption investigation into the deal.
President Akufo-Addo however, pestered Amidu to water down the report by adding a written response by Ken Ofori-Atta. When he refused, he decided he had had enough of being made a “Poodle” by the Akufo Addo administration and simply resigned.
According to Mr Amidu, “the 64-page analysis of corruption and anti-corruption assessment report, discloses several serious corruption and corruption-related offenses in relation to the Agyapa deal