The Minister of Finance Dr Mohammed Amin Adam has accused the management of Sunon Asogli Power Plant Limited of acting in “bad faith” for shutting down its plants over debt owed them.
The Minister had stated that an agreement to settle the debt was expected to be signed within days, which would prevent further disruptions to Ghana’s power supply.
Dr. Amin Adam, speaking to the media at the close of the Annual IMF-World Bank Meetings in Washington, D.C., he said “Asogli submitted the final agreement for our review. We reviewed it and are fine with it except for one issue which led to the shutdown. So when the Ministry of Finance made the one-off payment to all the IPPs, we were supposed to pay Asogli $30 million and subsequently, they made a case for another $30 million but we did not agree to that so we finalise the negotiations with them on the arrears.
“ECG actually led the negotiations and as part of the settlement, ECG wanted us to pay the $30 million. ECG made a case for which we didn’t agree so I had meetings with Asogli and we agreed that we would pay but we wanted them to sign the settlement agreement because this is one of the terms of the agreement and they said no, we should pay before they sign but if it is part of the settlement agreement why should I implement an agreement that has not been signed.
“So we communicated this to ourselves only for Asogli to come to say they no longer wanted $30 million but they wanted $60 million dollars and that if we don’t pay them they will shut down.”
“So it will be as if we as a country, we don’t know our rights especially when an election is closer everybody thinks that when I put a gun on the head of government by going ahead to shut down, they acted in bad faith.”
Management of Sunon Asogli Power (Ghana) Limitedearlier said that they had been compelled to suspend operations since Tuesday, 8th October 2024.
This was contained in a press release dated October 16.
The Chairman lamented that “Our debt has grown by 23% on the net balance, between January 2024 and September 2024 and only 22.6% of the invoices for period has been paid by ECG from the Cash Waterfall Mechanism.”
He expressed regret over the impact of this decision on the national power supply.
” We expect the Ministry of Finance to intervene for us to return to operations as soon as possible,” Mr. Yang urged.
Speaking in an interview on 3FM’s Hot Edition, a former Minister of Power, Dr Kwabena Donkor said, “this will affect power supply. Sunon Asogli is the largest single Independent Power Supplier.”