The Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, has promised justice to consumers of the defunct gold trading business, Menzgold Ghana Limited.
This comes on the heels of the filing of a fresh charge sheet in the High Court, in which the CEO of Menzgold, Nana Appiah Mensah, is charged with 39 counts of defrauding by false pretense, operating in gold dealing without a license, and money laundering.
Dame called the bankrupt dealership corporation a Ponzi scam that had left many of its victims homeless, with shattered marriages, and in some cases, dead.
He stated this during his keynote talk 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 contacts 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,” he stated.
Dame also singled out the scandal involving former Public Procurement Authority (PPA) boss, Adjenim Boateng Adjei, as the most shocking of all 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 phenomenal. 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.
