The Akufo-Addo government is full of wickedness, UT Bank founder Prince Kofi Amoabeng has said.
According to him, unlike former president John Mahama, who, in his view, was tolerant, President Akufo-Addo and his government are full of envy and jealousy; and quick to target people of fortune for persecution.
“One thing I know is that, at least, with the NDC, envy and jealousy and persecutions were limited, if they existed at all”, Mr Amoabeng told Nana Otu Darko on CTV’s morning show Dwabre Mu on Tuesday, 4 October 2022.
“With this government [Akufo-Addo administration], however, what you find is that, for some reason, they are full of wickedness”, he noted.
“I mean, the way they willy-nilly pursue people who are supposed to be making it; it happened only in Rawlings’ time and, so, for a civilian government, I find it surprising because my relationship with the NPP wasn’t bad at all and if you want to close down a bank, I felt the least you could do is to call the directors of the bank and say, ‘because of A, B, C, we are closing down the bank’”, he explained.
“The bank cannot run away like a fugitive”, Mr Amoabeng pointed out.
UT Bank and some eight other Ghanaian banks were collapsed by the Bank of Ghana in the first term of President Nana Akufo-Addo for various infractions.
Some of them had gone insolvent while others mismanaged bailout funds given to them by the Bank of Ghana, the Governor of the central bank announced at various media engagements during the financial sector clean-up exercise.
Mr Amoabeng, however, said using armed security personnel to close down the bank in a war-like fashion spoke volumes of the kind of government Mr Akufo-Addo was leading.
“In the morning [of the bank’s closure], like a military operation, you organised the police and the press to go and close down a bank. The bank’s insignia was vandalised as though they were bringing down an evil fetish god. That’s what happened”, he recalled.
“I was asleep at Kukurantumi when all this was happening”, he revealed to Nana Otu Darko, noting: “I was never told about the closure of the bank”.
In his view, “If you [government] felt because the bank was owing the Bank of Ghana, even if you wouldn’t discuss that with us and were going to close the bank down, was that how to go about it?”
“With armed police to vandalise the bank’s insignia?” he wondered.
“But I don’t live in the past. I’m a very happy person … Even if we were at fault, was that how to close down the bank?” he stressed.
He said: “I’m not saying they can’t close down the bank; it’s an option that they had but unfortunately, I personally don’t agree with the option but I don’t want us to go there”.