Edward Bawa, a member of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, is requesting information from the government regarding the conditions of the cash used to acquire the first shipment of oil in accordance with the government’s gold for oil policy.
The initial 40,000 tonnes of diesel that came in January under the program were worth at US$40 million, according to the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), which the Member of Parliament for Bongo claims was pre-financed by the central bank.
The legislator told reporters that the people must be held accountable for the transaction by the government.
You may recall that Andrew Egyapa Mercer, the deputy minister of energy, stated that the Bank of Ghana used ore financing for the initial shipment rather than paying with gold.
Is it a loan to BOST, you ask?
If so, what were the conditions of the contract?
That information is not public.
The amount of petroleum they deliver is insufficient to maintain the window, if you look at it.
There have been numerous requests for the government to provide the contract information for the most recent fuel shipment made possible via the gold for oil scheme.
What was said by Mercer?
It became clear that any foreign oil trading organizations who do not have a commodity wing to deal with gold on their behalf will be barred from the policy. The strategy originally had the intention of doing rigorous barter for gold and petroleum products.
In order to pay for IOTs that were solely focused on petroleum products and not other commodities, we developed the policy such that we were operating two streams, one of which was direct barter and the second of which was monetising the gold. As a result, the test run that we did was actually funded through the second route.
