Story: Yaw Takyi 

The former Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta  is credited to have  said, “iliquidity leads to insolvency” during the COVID crisis.  

Today Newspaper’s investigations  have uncovered that Mr Ofori-Atta  knew what he was doing when he  forced the  Bank of Ghana (BoG) and Securities  and Exchange Commission (SEC)  to revoke Gold Coast/BlackShield and GN Bank licences.  

Sources close to GN bank and Gold Coast/ BlackShield  said, they tried it with the insurance and pension companies but  that did not work.  

“When they took over in 2017, they saw huge debts owed to GN funded contractors after they froze all contractor payments and projects.  For so-called forensic reviews.  Nothing came out of this.  However, having discovered the huge debts, they decided not to pay GN contractors knowing that it would squeeze liquidity out of our companies and make them unable to meet customer redemption requests”, the source said. 

Our further investigations also revealed that  some people in government  even bused customers to GN branches to demand payments. 

“They organized a march to Jubilee House even.  They knew that if they had only paid 300 million certified IPC debts, all our companies would have been okay.  So they put an embargo on payments to any GN company.  Now the debt has ballooned to 7.1 billion Ghana cedis and still climbing”.  

“A demand letter for this amount was served on the administration with copies to the president, vice president, chief of staff, attorney general, minister of finance, COCOBOD,  GETFund, Ministries  of Works and Housing, Roads and Highways, etc. two months ago.  No responses because some claim there is no money.  Even one quarter of that money will revive the GN companies.  That’s the message.  The solution is the payment of debts owed by government and its agencies.  So, why are they keeping our licenses”, the source quizzed?