Member of Parliament for the Assin Central Constituency, Kennedy Ohene Agyapong has described as baseless calls for the Director General of Ghana Maritime Authority (GMA) to be dismissed following allegations of financial malfeasance.

“You really want my good friend Kwame Owusu to be sacked because of this peanut. Kwame Owusu will still eat when he is removed from office. The guy has brains. He won’t go and sweep your house when Akufo-Addo sacks him.

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“A man who has moved from negative to positive and you think he will be affected [by these allegations], hell no,” Ken said on Asempa FM’s Ekosii Sen Monday.

Mr Owusu made headlines Tuesday after he held a news conference to rebut accusations that he had misappropriated taxpayers’ money and also put himself in a conflict of interest position, following his organization’s decision to hold an end-of-year party with state funds in a hotel he owns.

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But the controversial MP warned Ghanaians against tarnishing the hard-earned reputation of a man who he believes has brought massive and positive change to the authority.

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Member of Parliament for the Assin Central Constituency, Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, has strongly defended the embattled Director-General of the Ghana Maritime Authority (GMA), Kwame Owusu.

Assessing Mr Owusu’s reaction to conflict of interest allegations levelled against him, Mr Agyapong said his posturing so far is the best, insisting he would’ve said worst things if he were in the GMA boss’ shoes.

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Kennedy Agyapong, who described Kwame Owusu as his good friend said reports suggesting he had misappropriated state funds to build a hotel in his hometown in less than two years of assuming office were false.

“Kwame Owusu is a very good friend of mine and he tells me everything. Why have journalists in this country refused to do due diligence before accusing him of misappropriating funds,” he asked.

Mr Agyapong also insists that the hotel in which the end-of-year party was organised does not belong to Mr Owusu.

“The party was held at the Ghana Maritime premises. There is nothing like a conflict of interest anywhere so you guys should shut up. In fact, if I were Kwame, I would have said worst things. This is just nonsense; excuse me but this is just stupid,” he stated.

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The outspoken MP, speaking on Asempa FM‘s Ekosii Sen Monday, also rubbished claims Mr Owusu’s outfit spent a whopping GHC10,652 on food for 8 people at the Luxe Suites Hotel for one night.

According to him, the GHC10,652 was the total amount spent on several meetings including the management and stakeholder meetings on maritime security fees and charges at the head office.

The incident took place a day ahead of an Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) forensic audit into the operations of the authority.

Fire gutted the finance department of the GMA last Wednesday, destroying every document and leaving the institution with no financial records in hard copies.

No backup

“Unfortunately, we do not have a backup of what we lost and the authority has all this while been keeping records manually,” the Director-General of the GMA, Kwame Owusu, confirmed to the Daily Graphic on Tuesday.

He explained that a team from EOCO was at the GMA to begin a preliminary forensic audit, but the fire incident occurred on the eve of the scheduled date (last Thursday) for the full audit.

He said investigations were underway to establish the cause of the fire and until then, he could not conclude whether the incident was arson to cover up malfeasance.

The authority

The GMA was established by an Act of Parliament (Act 630 of 2002) with the responsibility of monitoring, regulating and coordinating activities in the maritime industry.

It is headed by a director-general with a 13-member governing board, made up mainly of institutional representatives from key maritime agencies.

Mr Owusu, who assumed office in March this year, said he took over an institution in dire financial straits.

Millions lost

The director-general said the authority, in 2016, lost GH¢7 million as a result of financial impropriety, citing the lack of prudent financial management as responsible for the situation.

He posited that the financial immodesty found expression in the expenditure of the authority which far exceeded its income.

“The ideas I am bringing here are re-engineering and cost cutting. Things are now getting better and there is a lot we can do,” Mr Owusu said.

Monitoring

On how effectively the authority was monitoring the country’s territorial waters, Mr Owusu expressed concern that the GMA, since its inception, had no patrol boats to monitor territorial waters.

He, therefore, noted that he would champion an effort to procure more surveillance equipment and patrol boats to secure the country’s waters.

However, the Special Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, (ITLOS), sitting in Hamburg, Germany, declined to order the payment of compensation to Cote d’Ivoire.

Experts say the international court would most likely have ordered Ghana to pay reparation to Cote d’Ivoire from the date it (Ghana) commenced the drilling of oil in commercial quantities in 2010.

The dispute concerning the delimitation of the maritime boundary between Ghana and Co?te d’Ivoire in the Atlantic Ocean was concluded last Saturday with the judgement unanimously in favour of Ghana.

Ghana filed the claim in 2014 after about 10 negotiations with Cote d’Ivoire over the maritime boundary had failed.

The West African neighbour then filed a counter claim, including reparation, whilst at the same time laying claim to portions of huge oil and gas reserves located around the maritime boundary between the two countries in the Western Region.

Final Boundary

The Special Chamber ruled that to delimit the new maritime boundary, it would use a new Land Boundary Terminus (LBT) that it had set at BP55plus, thus rejecting the different LBTs (geographical coordinates of BP55 in the case of Ghana and 168 degrees azimuth line put forward by Cote d’Ivoire).

In effect, the court has generated a new base point with which to draw the final boundary, which it said is an Equidistance Line Boundary covering the Territorial Sea – the Exclusive Economic Zone in the area beyond 200 nautical miles – and experts have said it looks good for Ghana as far as exploration of oil and gas is concerned.

Per the judgement, Cote d’Ivoire has lost almost every claim against Ghana, except the order by the Special Tribunal for the two countries to re-demarcate the maritime boundary; but will be of no significance as far as the huge claims put forward by Ghana’s western neighbour are concerned.

“The new and final maritime boundary line protects Ghana’s existing concessions,” an unnamed source told DAILY GUIDE immediately after the judgement, adding, “It protects all areas belonging to Ghana which go up to the 200 nautical miles limit in the area beyond 200 nautical miles up to 350 nautical miles.”

Tacit Agreement

Ghana appeared to have lost the argument of Tacit Agreement moved against Cote d’Ivoire, which it said confirmed the full scope of over 50 years of joint activities between the two countries regarding the maritime boundary.

Although Ghana lost that argument, it turned out that it was the display of the maps brought by Ghana that largely aided the Special Tribunal to come to the conclusion that the maritime boundary line should be drawn using the BP55plus coordinate.

Cote d’Ivoire, in its quest to get the maritime boundary re-demarcated, tried to convince the court that Jomoro in the Jomoro District of the Western Region, is an island or a kind of a peninsula, but the court dismissed the claim saying the Ivoirians themselves had always recognized the fact that Jomoro has been Ghana’s bonafide territory.

Consequential Orders

The Special Tribunal summed up the whole judgement in seven key points and in all of them, it was unanimous in dismissing the case brought by Cote d’Ivoire.

It unanimously found out that it has jurisdiction to delimit the maritime boundary between the parties in the territorial sea, in the exclusive economic zone and on the continental shelf – both within and beyond 200 nm.

The tribunal also unanimously found that there is no tacit agreement between the parties to delimit their territorial sea, exclusive economic zone and continental shelf both within and beyond 200 nm, and rejected Ghana’s claim that Côte d’Ivoire was estopped from objecting to the customary equidistance boundary.

Case History

When Ghana discovered oil in commercial quantities in 2007, Cote d’Ivoire said Ghana was straying into its waters in the course of the exploration exercise at West Cape Three Points.

Cote d’Ivoire came again with a renewed set of claims in 2010, including compensation from Ghana for entering into its territory when the Dzata-1 Deepwater Well was discovered by Vanco.

Ghana then constituted the Ghana Boundary Commission in March 2010, after Cote d’Ivoire had petitioned the United Nations over the oil exploratory activities and requested for a demarcation of the maritime boundary.

After about 10 high-level negotiations between Ghana and Code d’Ivoire had yielded no dividends, Ghana filed a petition before ITLOS in 2014, asking the special tribunal to look into the matter and bring finality to it.

Cote d’Ivoire responded, adding a counter-claim, including the payment of reparation from Ghana and appealed to the special tribunal to suspend all activities on the disputed area until the final determination of the case.

The first ruling given by ITLOS was in 2015 when it placed a moratorium on new projects that were being undertaken by Ghana, but said the old projects could continue.

The moratorium prevented Tullow Oil from drilling additional 13 wells. The company drilled 11 wells in Ghana’s first oil field.

The International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) on Saturday, September 23, 2017 unanimously ruled that Ghana did not violate the rights of Cote d’Ivoire in exploring oil at the maritime boundary.

Côte d’Ivoire had accused Ghana of overstepping its maritime boundary in the exploration of oil at the West most part of the Cape Three Points.

But the ITLOS Chamber in a unanimous decision on Saturday held that, there has not been any violation on the part of Ghana on Côte d’Ivoire’s maritime boundary.

The Chamber rejected Côte d’Ivoire’s argument that Ghana’s coastal lines were unstable.

Commenting on the judgment, Mr Anning indicated that in as much as the ruling means a lot for Ghanaians, it’s important for the Ghanaian side not gloat over the victory.

“The ruling is very important for Ghanaians but we must be careful not to make too much noise and tease the other side” he said on Accra based Neat FM.

He noted that both countries, have shown maturity and demonstrated that Africans are united.

“Africans are united and I think the ruling will also bring peace and stability between two countries. Côte d’Ivoire can still come and do business with Ghana and so we should look at the bigger picture and the benefits for Africa. It is important that ordinary citizens check their utterances on the matter” he advised.

The security analyst further commended the patience exhibited by Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire within the almost a decade long dispute.