A member of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and Member of Parliament for Buem, Kofi Adams, says the committee was oblivious to the government’s $12 million expenditure on the suspended Agyapa royalties deal.
The CEO of the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF), Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng, disclosed that the government had spent the amount on the suspended deal at a PAC sitting on Tuesday, February 13.
The government proposed the deal to raise funds through mineral royalties for key infrastructure projects but was eventually suspended after the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) and some civil society organizations opposed it.
The MIIF CEO said the $12 million was expended on the processes to issue the initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange before the suspension.
Mr. Adams told Umaru Sanda Amadu in an interview on Eyewitness News on Citi FM on Tuesday that the committee was ignorant of the expenditure and that a public interest question had led to that revelation made by the MIIF CEO.
He noted that the Auditor General’s report had also not captured that expenditure.
“This is the very first time that we all are being provided with this information that the country actually wasted $12 million of its money at the time we have been told that the country was faced with a number of challenges in chasing after a ghost. And that the president and all those who considered this whole deal never informed all of us that $12 million of our money had already been funded into a project that didn’t have the permission of appropriate bodies,” he stated.
He further said that “According to the CEO of MIIF, the Ministry of Finance gave them the go-ahead to go into such an investment and that in taking a decision to stop, they were not involved. And that he could not even provide us with the reasons why the decision to stop was taken. And according to him, the letter to stop was sent to the Attorney General, who looked at it and advised. They as MIIF were not involved in any way in terms of stoppage. And truly speaking this was the first time. And this was not even in the Auditor General’s report but this was out of a public interest question…A member wanted to know about the Agyapa deal and the recent investment in the lithium found in the central region.”