Member of Parliament for Buem and a member of the Public Accounts Committee, Kofi Adams, has expressed shock at the Committee’s lack of awareness regarding the government’s spending on the suspended Agyapa royalties deal.
During a PAC session on Tuesday, CEO of the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF), Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng, revealed that the government had allocated funds for the suspended deal.
The Agyapa deal aimed to generate funds for critical infrastructure projects through mineral royalties but faced opposition from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and various civil society groups, leading to its suspension.
Mr. Koranteng disclosed that $12 million had been spent on the initial public offering process on the London Stock Exchange before the suspension.
But Mr. Adams, in an interview on Citi FM, expressed shock at the Committee’s lack of prior knowledge about this expenditure.
He said neither the Auditor General’s report nor previous disclosures had mentioned this spending.
“This is the very first time that we all are being provided with this information that the country actually wasted $12 million of its money at the time we have been told that the country was faced with a number of challenges in chasing after a ghost. And that the president and all those who considered this whole deal never informed all of us that $12 million of our money had already been funded into a project that didn’t have the permission of appropriate bodies,” he stated.
He further said that “According to the CEO of MIIF, the Ministry of Finance gave them the go-ahead to go into such an investment and that in taking a decision to stop, they were not involved. And that he could not even provide us with the reasons why the decision to stop was taken. And according to him, the letter to stop was sent to the Attorney General, who looked at it and advised. They as MIIF were not involved in any way in terms of stoppage. And truly speaking this was the first time. And this was not even in the Auditor General’s report but this was out of a public interest question…A member wanted to know about the Agyapa deal and the recent investment in the lithium found in the central region.”
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