The Attorney General of Ghana, Godfred Yeboah Dame, has assured customers of the defunct gold trading company, Menzgold Ghana Limited, that justice will be served.
This assurance comes in the wake of a new charge sheet filed at the High Court, where the CEO of Menzgold, Nana Appiah Mensah (NAM 1), has been charged with 39 counts, including defrauding by false pretence, engaging in gold trading without a license, and money laundering.
Dame characterized Menzgold as a Ponzi scheme that has inflicted considerable harm on its victims, leaving some homeless, causing broken marriages, and even leading to loss of life.
He made these remarks during his keynote address at the 40th International Symposium on International Crime.
“It called itself Menzbank and metamorphosed into a number of names before eventually taking up the name Menzgold. It dealt with the purchase of gold collectables from the public and issued contracts with guaranteed returns to the public without a license from the relevant authorities…I am happy to state that after painstaking investigations, criminal prosecutions have commenced into the perpetrators,” Dame stated.
Dame also highlighted the scandal involving the former Public Procurement Authority (PPA) boss, Adjenim Boateng Adjei, as one of the most shocking cases of procurement-related corruption scandals involving public officials.
“A detection of false or inconsistent claims by contractors is often hampered by the illicit protection extended by public procurement officers who have the mandate to detect and revise them. The most chilling and perhaps shocking case of such dealing was witnessed when the former head of the PPA was implicated in what was notoriously described as the contract-for-sale phenomenon. As the head of the PPA, he was alleged to have established a company in which he held majority shares and which also actively bid for government contracts and which was subsequently sold to other contractors at a higher price.”
“The regulation of this act promptly resulted in the termination of his employment by the president of the republic and the withdrawal of his membership by various professional institutions and his prosecution which is ongoing,” he stated.
Reporting by Hanson Agyemang. Editing by Mariam Aminu
