What does ORAL, the banking cleanup, and the 24-hr economy vision all have in common?
It turns out quite a bit. I am going to tell you a story. For certain strategic reasons, certain names would be left out for now. I know other analysts are digging and will share more details.
There is a large factory on Spintex Road. The owner of this factory also owns one of the banks that were closed down.
For a long time, the factory was used to park money, wash money, move money, etc.
Seven years ago, it was used to wash nearly $3 million under the dubious cover that some consultancy had been done by an affiliate for one of the energy sector players. Nothing like that was in fact done.
In the heat of the bank closures, the owner of the factory purported to have taken a loan from an entity in an offshore jurisdiction using the factory as collateral/security.
The factory was not touched during the banking cleanup. Like so many assets owned by bank owners, it was shielded.
This is one of the reasons why the banking cleanup became such a costly mess. In the US and the UK, where massive bank bailouts occurred after the 2008 – 2010 financial crisis, the governments made profits on the funds they invested because they recovered/remediated loads of the assets of the banks involved. In Ghana, the asset recovery rate was so bad that the country is facing a loss of billions of dollars. Nobody wants to tell the people how much in total of the multibillion-dollar target has been recovered.
Some of the people who owned some of the banks that were cleaned up have massive political clout. Already the Attorney General is under pressure to discontinue BOTH the prosecutions and the asset recovery effort against virtually ALL the bank owners.
In some ways, recovering assets using the bank resolution law is far easier than what ORAL has been tasked to do. Hence, if the bank assets recovery for all the banks fails, legitimate questions can be asked about ORAL’s chances of success.
Secondly, information has now come to light that the factory in question was also leased to a major industrialist in Ghana. Despite years of idleness and shadiness, the factory was turned around, and was producing inputs for major multinationals in Ghana. These are the same value chains needed for the 24-hour economy vision to come to life.
In the last couple of weeks, something crazy has happened. The factory has been seized by people purportedly working for the offshore company that loaned money to the bank owner. The problem is that the industrialist has paid a lot of money to lease the factory. There are tenancy rights at stake. There is also evidence that the offshore company may not be real; it is a front.
What seems to be happening here is that some people who hid assets during the banking cleanup using elaborate offshore covers have become emboldened and are now resurfacing those assets in the belief that the new government shall discontinue the asset recovery effort.
In the meantime, serious production at the factory has halted. People who are better at washing money rather than creating jobs think they can exploit the change in government to assert themselves. The new government needs to be very vigilant about these kinds of things. The filla doesn’t just stay in Ghana.
